ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Contested Truths and Vanished Worlds: Reclaiming Weberian Electrodynamics Through Histories of Epistemic Disobedience

• In Event: Intersections between History and Philosophy of Physics

English Abstract

This paper argues that the nineteenth-century disappearance of action-at-a-distance electrodynamics should be understood less as theoretical supersession than as the historical silencing of a contested truth. Rather than centring the familiar narrative of field theory’s rise, the analysis foregrounds the marginal voices—including Wilhelm Weber and later advocates such as Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner—whose work persisted outside the emerging epistemic order. Their commitments to instantaneous mechanical causation, direct force measurement, and relational interaction constituted not merely an alternative theory but a distinct ontological style, one rendered increasingly unintelligible as the conceptual and material infrastructures that sustained it eroded.
Drawing on Ian Hacking’s framework of historical ontology (1992, 2002), the paper interprets the Weberian tradition as a scientific world whose viability depended on instruments, mathematical grammars, and explanatory ideals that gradually ceased to function. When the electrodynamometer lost epistemic authority, when differential form replaced central-force reasoning, and when aesthetic norms shifted toward continuity and symmetry, the Weberian world became unperformable. Its disappearance exemplifies what Hacking describes as the historical “passing away of kinds” rather than the correction of error.
Re-examining this episode through shifting historiographical perspectives reveals how the consolidation of field theory enacted a form of epistemic disobedience in reverse: by redefining legitimate causation, it excluded alternative ways of world-making without fully engaging their coherence. Attending to figures like Zöllner illuminates how suppressed ontologies survive at the margins, offering evidence of plural scientific worlds whose erasure has shaped our understanding of what counts as scientific reality.

Author

• Laura Bujalance, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos