Gender and Boyle's Law of Gases (review)

"[S]cience can be influenced by gender and class politics and still be good science" (2001, 172), Elizabeth Potter contends near the end of her fast-paced and far-ranging book, Gender and Boyle's Law of Gases. This contention rests on two claims: first, that Robert Boyle's science, particularly his gas law, was good science; second, that Boyle's science was influenced by class and gender politics. Taking the first to be uncontroversial, Potter offers an extended argument for the second. This review will liken Potter's argument to Boyle's air-pump: we can learn much from it despite its leaks.

The book falls into two parts of unequal size. The two chapters of Part I treat gender and Boyle's law of gas separately; the seventeen chapters of Part II strive to link them. Ranging from the social, religious, and economic history of England in the turbulent years surrounding the English Civil War to Boyle's engagement with natural magic, these chapters exhibit a dense dialectical weave whose richness a short review cannot begin to convey. Potter's treatment of Boyle's writings on gender—the tone of which may be conveyed by his exhortation, "give me a woman whose chastity is not only so constantly impregnable that no man can force it, but so notedly severe that no man dares besiege it" (Boyle 1772, vol. XXXVII, 159; see also Potter 2001, 6)—is worth the price of the book. I will focus here on reconstructing Potter's case "that contextual values influenced [Boyle's] choice to pursue a mechanistic research program, and so influenced his interpretation of the data, e.g. the data confirming Boyle's law" (173).

Potter rejects the naïve inductivist position that "the data alone proved Boyle's hypothesis" (161), which she attributes to unnamed "traditional Boyle scholars" (163). Yet in fact it seems apparent that just about everyone—including, as Potter indicates, the arch-traditional philosopher of science Carl Hempel (166), not to mention Boyle himself (158)—dismisses naïve inductivism. The data's failure to prove the hypothesis by which Boyle would explain his gas law does not on its own demonstrate that contextual factors, specifically sociopolitical factors, seeped into Boyle's grounds for that hypothesis (this argument would run against the grain of traditional assessments of Boyle's work [see, for example, Conant 1970]) . Boyle could, after all, have opted for his hypothesis in the service of politically innocent, putatively constitutive methodological values—he called them "Requisites of a Good Hypothesis" (Boyle 1772, vol. XXXV; see also Potter 2001, 155)—such as simplicity or compatibility with established theories. He could, moreover, have opted for his hypothesis out of whimsy, by rolling dice, or simply because no other fit the data. In none of these cases would Potter say that class and gender politics influenced his science.

To eliminate such cases and to establish the influence of contextual values, Potter claims: 1) that another research tradition, a hylozoic one, is adequate to the data Boyle took to support his law; 2) that this hylozoic tradition sustained the political radicalism of religious sectaries (such as, for example, Levellers, Ranters, Quakers, and Diggers); and 3) that Boyle preferred the mechanical hypothesis to the hylozoic one "in part because [hylozoic] animism was associated with radical enthusiasm" (108). Taken together, these three claims suggest that sociopolitical contextual values, in the form of Boyle's distaste for sectarian radicalism, supported his mechanical hypothesis over hylozoic alternatives. I will discuss each of these three claims in turn, spending the most time on the first.

1. "[T]here could have been a hylozoic alternative to Boyle's law" (xii). A review (of the sort Potter presents in her second chapter) of a standard story about how Boyle came to accept his gas law will set the stage for this claim. Begin with the "Torricelli experiment," which you can recreate by filling a...