title: [From controversy to scientific discussion: The dispute over the vacuum and its Pascalian metamorphosis].
abstract: Pascal's Expériences nouvelles touchant le vide (1647) outlines a physical demonstration that aims to put to an end controversies between plenists and vacuists. The traditional form of the dispute with which Pascal wanted to break, however, finds itself reactivated by Étienne Noël, who takes up again the plenist objections which the Expériences nouvelles only consider as possible the better to refute them. Pascal's letters Au très révérend père Noël and À Monsieur Le Pailleur on the contrary permit one to define a field of disputation different from the one which Noël perpetuates. Pascal subordinates the dispute to the recognition of common epistemological principles: the antithetical discussion about the vacuum should be governed by methodological criteria accepted by all. In contrast with the model of the learned dispute, Pascal thus defines a radically new model: the scientific dispute.
authors.affiliation: CNRS-EHESS, Paris, France.
authors.forename: Martine
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Pécharman
keywords: controversy; experimental proof; method of reasoning; rules of discussion; scientific dispute