The Great Devonian Controversy was sparked, in the mid 1830s, by a disagreement amongst British geologists about how to interpret and date certain types of rocks (Greywacke) in Devon. Roughly a decade later, it culminated in the postulation and broad acceptance of a novel geological period, the Devonian, that separates the earlier Silurian and the later Carboniferous periods.
<p>The Great Devonian Controversy represents an exceptionally well documented scientific controversy (Rudwick 1985), and has been referred to in philosophy of science before (Kitcher 1993, pp. 211-18). Note, however, that the following reconstruction—drawing an over-simplified picture of the debate—serves purely illustrative purposes and does, in particular, not pretend to do justice to the complexity of the debate.
<p>For the sake of illustration, we consider but the two major proponents of the controversy: the geologists Henry T. De la Beche (b. 1796) and Roderick I. Murchison (b. 1792). De la Beche served, in the early 1830s, as secretary to the Geological Society under Murchison’s presidency. As a very rough approximation, we may distinguish four consecutive phases of the controversy, which are characterized by specific dialectic contexts.
