Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
The second mereological fallacy threatens when it is taken for granted that the
products of an analytical procedure exercised on a whole can be read back into that
whole as its parts or some of its parts. In psychology one can elicit memories from
another person of past tense statements or depictions of the past but it is a fallacy to
assume that such discrete memories are components of the person who has
expressed them. This fallacy appears in the concept of the memory
'
store
'
and
the concept of an
'
engram
'
. Whatever it is that grounds a person
'
s capacity to
remember things it is not a box full of
. The discrete components of a
living human being that make remembering possible are the molecular structures of
neural nets. The attributes that make a recollection this memory are quite different
from those make a molecular structure this engram.
To disentangle the conditions under which the fallacies occur another important
concept has recently been added to the philosophical repertoire for analyzing
chemical discourses. This is the concept of
memories
'
'
affordance
.
'
'
8.5 Affordances
is the word coined by J. J. Gibson (
1979
) to present his theory of
perception. This was a radical departure from the sense data theories of such as
Russell and the constructionism of such as Kant. In those theories what we see is
said to be the product of a cognitive process by which elementary sensations, such
as coloured patches in the visual field, are synthetized into objects and processes.
Gibson argued that certain invariant structural properties of things afforded
perceptions of those things to people and animals as they explored the flux of
electromagnetic and sonic energy within they lived. Not only that, but Gibson
pointed out that we can also discern perceptually what something can be used for.
Most people can see that a knife can be used for cutting - in this terminology we say
a knife affords cutting. But only in a human context does a certain piece of steel
have that attribute. We can also say that a floor affords walking to people, while a
lake does not, though it did to Jesus. An affordance is relative to context, in
particular to the specific interaction between some human beings and the material
world.
From the point of view of the grammar of a chemical discourse an affordance is a
disposition or capacity as ascribed to a certain material being to yield an observable
effect when acted upon in a certain manner. It may be an observable property, say
'
Affordance
'
'
, or an entity, say a gas as the product of a chemical reaction, that is
when certain substances are acted on in a certain way. In mereological chemistry
we conclude that the advent of tensile strength is due to a new arrangement of
the atoms in the molecules of at least one of the reagents, while the advent of the gas
is the release of a constituent of one of the original substances. We imbibe
mereological thinking with the very first chemical experiment many of us perform -
obtaining a sample of hydrogen from the reaction of metallic zinc with a dilute
solution of hydrochloric acid.
tensile strength
'
