The notion of nature in chemistry

If nature is by definition the object of the natural sciences, then the dichotomy ‘natural’ versus ‘chemical’, held by both chemists and nonchemists, suggests an idiosyncrasy of chemistry. The first part of the paper presents a selective historical analysis of the main notions of nature in chemistry, as developed in early Christian views of chemical crafts, alchemy, iatrochemistry, mechanical philosophy, organic chemistry, and contemporary drug research. I argue that the dichotomy as well as quasi-moral judgments of chemistry have been based on static and teleological notions of nature throughout history and that chemists, unlike physicists, have neglected the dynamic notion of nature. The second part provides a philosophical criticism of the former notions and argues for the latter as well as for an explicit discourse about values in chemistry.     

Instruments and rules: R. B. Woodward and the tools of twentieth-century organic chemistry

The paper illustrates how organic chemists dramatically altered their practices in the middle part of the twentieth century through the adoption of analytical instrumentation — such as ultraviolet and infrared absorption spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy — through which the difficult process of structure determination for small molecules became routine. Changes in practice were manifested in two ways: in the use of these instruments in the development of ‘rule-based’ theories; and in an increased focus on synthesis, at the expense of chemical analysis. These rule-based theories took the form of generalizations relating structure to chemical and physical properties, as measured by instrumentation. This ‘Instrumental Revolution’ in organic chemistry was two-fold: encompassing an embrace of new tools that provided unprecedented access to structures, and a new way of thinking about molecules and their reactivity in terms of shape and structure. These practices suggest the possibility of a change in the ontological status of chemical structures, brought about by the regular use of instruments. The career of Robert Burns Woodward (1917–1979) provides the central historical examples for the paper. Woodward was an organic chemist at Harvard from 1937 until the time of his death. In 1965, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.     

The autonomy of models and explanation: anomalous molecular rearrangements in early twentieth-century physical organic chemistry

During the 1930s and 1940s, American physical organic chemists employed electronic theories of reaction mechanisms to construct models offering explanations of organic reactions. But two molecular rearrangements presented enormous challenges to model construction. The Claisen and Cope rearrangements were predominantly inaccessible to experimental investigation and they confounded explanation in theoretical terms. Drawing on the idea that models can be autonomous agents in the production of scientific knowledge, I argue that one group of models in particular were functionally autonomous from the Hughes–Ingold theory. Cope and Hardy’s models of the Claisen and Cope rearrangements were resources for the exploration of the Hughes–Ingold theory that otherwise lacked explanatory power. By generating ‘how-possibly’ explanations, these models explained how these rearrangements could happen rather than why they did happen. Furthermore, although these models were apparently closely connected to theory in terms of their construction, I argue that partial autonomy issued in extra-logical factors concerning the attitudes of American chemists to the Hughes–Ingold theory. And in the absence of a complete theoretical hegemony, a degree of consensus was reached concerning modelling the Claisen rearrangement mechanism.     

Shifting ontologies, changing classifications: plant materials from 1700 to 1830

This paper studies European chemists’ shifting ontologies of materials by comparing the ways in which they classified materials. The focus is on plant materials, their different identities, and the changing ways chemists sorted out and ordered plant materials in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The main goals of the paper are to follow the development of plant materials from ordinary, everyday materials and commodities in the early eighteenth century to purified carbon compounds and organic substances familiar only to experts in the 1830s, and to reconstruct chemists’ ways of classifying these objects in different practical and intellectual contexts.The study of changes in European chemists’ ways of classifying plant materials over more than a century brings to the foreground a trajectory of ontological shifts that is ‘punctuated’ in the 1750s, the 1790s, and the 1830s. Early eighteenth-century plant materials, which were commodities of the apothecary trade and other arts and crafts, were elevated epistemically as compound components or ‘proximate principles’ of plants in the 1750s, reduced to organic compounds in the 1790s, and replaced by carbon compounds in the 1830s. The last, third transformation of the epistemic constitution of materials and the mode of their classification was accompanied by a deep transformation of the material culture of plant chemistry. After the late 1830s, many of the eighteenth-century vegetable commodities disappeared from chemists’ agenda or were split into different substances individuated and identified in new ways. Coal tar products, and new organic artefacts containing chlorine or bromine, entered the chemical laboratory in the 1820s and became fused with the purified rest of the previous plant and animal substances. The material objects of the new culture of organic chemistry became detached from the materials applied in the extant arts and crafts. It was only in the late 1850s, with the rise of the synthetic dye industry, that a great number of these laboratory substances became involved in industrial production.     

‘Physics and fashion’: John Tyndall and his audiences in mid-Victorian Britain

This paper explores how the physicist John Tyndall transformed himself from humble surveyor and schoolmaster into an internationally applauded icon of science. Beginning with his appointment as Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution in 1853, I show how Tyndall’s worries about his social class and Irish origins, his painstaking attention to his lecturing performance and skilled use of the material and architectural resources of the Royal Institution were vital to his eventual success as a popular expositor and ambassador for science. Secondly I explore the implications of Tyndall’s ‘popularity’ with respect to debates over the meaning and value of scientific ‘popularisation’. In support of recent work challenging diffusionist models of science communication, I show how Tyndall’s interactions with his audiences illustrate the symbiotic relationship between producer and consumer of ‘popular’ science. By examining the views of Tyndall’s critics—notably the ‘North British’ group of physicists—and his defenders and rivals in the domain of popular scientific lecturing, I show that disputes over Tyndall’s authority reflected anxieties about what constituted popular science and the transient boundaries between instruction and entertainment. The term ‘popularisation’ enjoyed many different uses in these debates, not least of all as a rheorical device with which to either exalt or destroy a scientist’s credibility.     

Collecting airs and ideas: Priestley’s style of experimental reasoning

It has often been claimed that Priestley was a skilful experimenter who lacked the capacities to analyze his own experiments and bring them to a theoretical closure. In attempts to revise this view some scholars have alluded to Priestley’s ‘synoptic’ powers while others stressed the contextual role of British Enlightenment in understanding his chemical research. A careful analysis of his pneumatic reports, privileging the dynamics of his experimental practice, uncovers significant yet neglected aspects of Priestley’s science. By focusing on his early experimental conduct and writing on nitrous air, I demonstrate how his methodological and rhetorical devices, far from being consequences of compulsive writing or theoretical naïveté, were deeply entwined with his chemical research. I employ the notion of ‘style of experimental reasoning’ (SER)—derived from A. C. Crombie and I. Hacking—to shed light on the intersection at which Priestley’s unique method, literary style, and epistemology converged to generate scientific knowledge. Establishing Priestley’s SER advances a finer understanding of the interactive character of his pneumatic experimentalism, peculiar dimensions of which have evaded both traditional as well as revisionist scholarship, thus infusing the longstanding historiographic debate over his scientific merits.     

Kitcher''s Compromise: A critical examination of the Compromise Model of scientific closure, and its implications for the relationship between history and philosophy of science

In The Advancement of Science (1993) Philip Kitcher develops what he calls the ‘Compromise Model’ of the closure of scientific debates. The model is designed to acknowledge significant elements from ‘Rationalist’ and ‘Antirationalist’ accounts of science, without succumbing to the one-sidedness of either. As part of an ambitious naturalistic account of scientific progress, Kitcher's model succeeds to the extent that transitions in the history of science satisfy its several conditions. 1 critically evaluate the Compromise Model by identifying its crucial assumptions and by attempting to apply the model to a major transition in the history of biology: the rejection of ‘naive group selectionism’ in the 1960s. I argue that the weaknesses and limitations of Kitcher's model exemplify general problems facing philosophical models of scientific change, and that recognition of these problems supports a more modest vision of the relationship between historical and philosophical accounts of science.     

Substantial confusion

In this paper I defend, against Eric Scerri’s objections, the following theses: (i) that Lavoisier and Mendeleev shared a ‘core conception’ of chemical element, and (ii) that this core conception underwrites referential continuity in the names of particular elements.     

Early nautical charts

Christian Wilhelm Blomstrand, Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy at Lund University from 1862 to 1895, was one of the important chemists of the second half of the nineteenth century. His theoretical ideas and experimental accomplishments contributed to advances in several branches of chemistry. Living in Sweden during a transitional period between the older and newer chemistry and being a scientific as well as a political conservative, Blomstrand sought to reconcile Berzelius's dualistic theory with the unitary and type theories. He was opposed to Kekulé's dogma of constant valency, and he strove to establish a sound and complete theory of variable valency. This article briefly outlines Blomstrand's life and considers his best known book, Die Chemie der Jetztzeit (1869), as well as his work on mineralogy, inorganic chemistry (the earth acid elements, heteropoly acids, platinum complexes), and his theoretical views on valency, diazo compounds, and metal-ammines. His so-called ‘chain theory’, as developed and modified by his fellow Scandinavian chemist and close friend, Sophus Mads Jørgensen, was for more than three decades the most popular and successful of the numerous attempts to explain the constitution, properties, and reactions of coordination compounds.     

A New interpretation of Michael Polanyi''s theory of tacit knowing: Integrative philosophy with ‘Intellectual Passions’

According to my interpretation, based on the entirety of Michael Polanyi's epistemological works, his theory of tacit knowing is conceived of as three models tied together by the central feature of Intellectual Passions as integrator. The models are progressively refined forms of his first conception of tacit knowing: ‘we know more than we can tell’. The three models are: the Gestalt-Perception Model based on the gestalt notion of part-whole relations, the Action-Guiding Model incorporating the phenomenological-existential notion of intentional action, and the Semiotic Model, an abstract conception of action directed to meaning showing that tacit knowing has a ‘from-to structure’ (from subsidiary awareness to focal awareness). In the Semiotic Model integration is named by the logical term ‘inference’. Polanyi's conception of reality and his theory of truth are introduced linked to the models, to show why his epistemology is not subjectivist and his theory of truth is not relativist.     

Can the constructive empiricist be a nominalist? Quasi-truth, commitment and consistency

In this paper, I explore Rosen’s (1994) ‘transcendental’ objection to constructive empiricism—the argument that in order to be a constructive empiricist, one must be ontologically committed to just the sort of abstract, mathematical objects constructive empiricism seems committed to denying. In particular, I assess Bueno’s (1999) ‘partial structures’ response to Rosen, and argue that such a strategy cannot succeed, on the grounds that it cannot provide an adequate metalogic for our scientific discourse. I conclude by arguing that this result provides some interesting consequences in general for anti-realist programmes in the philosophy of science.     

Carl du Prel (1839–1899): explorer of dreams, the soul, and the cosmos

Nineteenth-century spiritism was a blend of religious elements, the philosophy of mind, science and popular science and contacts with extraterrestrials were a commonplace phenomenon during spiritistic séances. Using the example of Carl du Prel (1839–1899) I show how his comprehensive mystic philosophy originated in a theory of extraterrestrial life. Carl du Prel used a Darwinian and monistic framework, theories of the unconscious and a Neo-Kantian epistemology to formulate a philosophy of astronomy and extraterrestrial life. He claimed that the mechanism of Darwinian selection is responsible for the distribution of stars and the orbits of the planets. In his speculations on the nature of extraterrestrial life he used the concept of organ projection to argue that technical solutions on earth will be realized organically on other planets and claimed that superior extraterrestrials have quantitatively and qualitatively different senses and thus different forms of intuition. A comparison with Camille Flammarion, spiritist and populariser of astronomy, demonstrates the contextual complexities of spiritism. In contrast to du Prel’s sober Neo-Kantian philosophical speculations, Flammarion was a late proponent of a French esoteric tradition that was rooted in romantic socialism, painted grand cosmological vistas and emphasized reincarnation. I put forward the hypothesis that current discourses on extraterrestrial life are affected by the spiritist tradition mainly through the ‘Golden Age’ science fiction literature of the 1940s and 50s and its successors. However, neither Carl du Prel nor Camille Flammarion contributed significantly to this tradition, which is mainly shaped by the psychical research of J. B. Rhine.     

On Minkowskian branching structures

In Belnap's [Branching space-time. Synthese, 92, 385–434. ‘Postprint’ archived at http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001003] theory of branching space-times (BST) Our World's possible histories are thought of as space-times, yet the theory has models in which histories do not resemble relativistic space-times or any other physical space-times. The aim of this paper is to define a certain class of BST models, called ‘Minkowskian Branching Structures’ (MBSs), in which histories are isomorphic to Minkowski space-time. By focusing on these models rather than on general BST models, we hope that one may be able to improve on earlier BST analyses of physical phenomena. Also, introducing MBSs sets the stage for recent discussions about whether or not branching is physically feasible.     

The literature and the science of ‘two cultures’ historiography

This paper discusses the historiography of the ‘two cultures’ controversy. C. P. Snow’s lament about the ‘two cultures’, literary and scientific, has inspired a wide range of comment—much of which begins by citing Snow and his thesis, before going on to discuss very different things. This paper focuses upon one strand of this commentary, the historical analysis of the controversy itself. A ‘historical’ analysis is defined here as one that resists the impulse to enter the argument on behalf of Snow or Leavis, to conceive of their argument in the terms that Snow defined, or to invoke their argument as a precursor to some contemporary issue. Instead, a historical interpretation registers distance between that day and this, takes the controversy itself as its object of study, and explores the tensions and associations that came to be packed into those now familiar terms. As the fiftieth anniversary of Snow’s Rede Lecture nears, this approach—rather than the repetition of clichés about the bridging of cultures—offers both analytical perspective on the controversy and interpretive possibilities for its examination.     

Saving the Strong Programme? A critique of David Bloor’s recent work

This article critically appraises David Bloor’s recent attempts to refute criticisms levelled at the Strong Programme’s social constructionist approach to scientific knowledge. Bloor has tried to argue, contrary to some critics, that the Strong Programme is not idealist in character, and it does not involve a challenge to the credibility of scientific knowledge. I argue that Bloor’s attempt to deflect the charge of idealism, which calls on the self-referential theory of social institutions, is partially successful. However, I suggest that although the Strong Programme should not be accused of ‘strong idealism’, it is still vulnerable to the criticism that it entails a form of ‘weak idealism’. The article moves on to argue that, contrary to Bloor, constructionist approaches do challenge the credibility of the scientific knowledge that they analyse. I conclude the article by arguing that sociological analyses of scientific knowledge can be conducted without the weak idealism and the credibility-challenging assumptions of the Strong Programme approach.     

The ontology of artefacts: the hard problem

We examine to what extent an adequate ontology of technical artefacts can be based on existing general accounts of the relation between higher-order objects and their material basis. We consider two of these accounts: supervenience and constitution. We take as our starting point the thesis that artefacts have a ‘dual nature’, that is, that they are both material bodies and functional objects. We present two criteria for an adequate ontology of artefacts, ‘Underdetermination’ (UD) and ‘Realizability Constraints’ (RC), which address aspects of the dual nature thesis. Assessing supervenience accounts, we find them either wanting with respect to these criteria or insufficiently informative. Next, we argue that a recent application of Lynne Rudder Baker’s constitution view to artefacts cannot (yet) meet our criteria, although the broader view leaves room for improvement. Based on our evaluation of the most promising candidates, we conclude that so far general metaphysical views fail to address the most salient features of artefacts. Although they can account for the fact that artefacts have a ‘dual nature’, they do not offer the conceptual resources needed to describe the relation between these natures; this relation raises a hard problem in metaphysics.     

Experiment versus mechanical philosophy in the work of Robert Boyle: a reply to Anstey and Pyle

We can distinguish ‘mechanical’ in the strict sense of the mechanical philosophers from ‘mechanical’ in the common sense. My claim is that Boyle's experimental science owed nothing to, and offered no support for, the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense. The attempts by my critics to undermine my case involve their interpreting ‘mechanical’ in something like the common sense. I certainly accept that Boyle's experimental science was productively informed by mechanical analogies, where ‘mechanical’ is interpreted in a common sense. But this leaves my original claim untouched and, in the main, unchallenged.     

Boyle on science and the mechanical philosophy: a reply to Chalmers

Robert Boyle thought that his scientific achievements in pneumatics and chemistry depended on, and thus provided support for, his mechanical philosophy. In a recent article in this journal, Alan Chalmers has challenged this view. This paper consists of a reply to Chalmers on two fronts. First it tries to specify precisely what ‘the mechanical philosophy’ meant for Boyle. Then it goes on to defend, against Chalmers, the view that Boyle's science does support his natural philosophy.