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By the mid-eighteenth century natural philosophers were beginning to realize that many successful theories violated the strictures of Newton's inductive experimental philosophy. The eighteenth century saw the acceptance of a variety of theories that posited unobservable entities, including Benjamin Franklin's (1706-1790) theory of electricity, which posited the existence of an unobservable electric fluid, the phlogiston theory of combustion and rust, which likewise posited an unobservable substance, and Augustin-Jean Fresnel's (1788-1827) wave theory of light which posited an unobservable fluid ether as the medium of light, and Herman Boerhaave's (1668-1738) vibratory theory of heat. [[CiteRef::Laudan (1984a)|pp. 56-57]][[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 54]] The methodologists of the early nineteenth century, William Whewell (1794-1866) and John Hershel (1792-1871) recognized that the actual practice of science did not conform to the prescribed Newtonian methodology and openly advocated the hypothetico-deductive method. [[CiteRef::Laudan (1984a)|pp. 56-60]]

|Related Topics=Methodology,

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