Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
One potential answer is pluralism. Non-reductive, pluralist positions on science
have been defended by Cartwright (
1983
) and Dupr
ยด
(
1993
); in the philosophy of
chemistry a variety of such a pluralist model is defended by Lombardi and Labarca
(
2005
) and to some degree in Hettema (
2012a
). Another potential answer is
emergence, a point of view that has been defended by Hendry (
2006
). In addition,
alternative notions of the unity of science have been developed, harking back to
Neurath
(see for instance Cartwright et al. (
1996
) and
Potochnik (
2011
)) on the one hand, or Duhem
'
s
'
encyclopedic project
'
on the
other (see for instance Needham (
2010
)). In addition, Bokulich (
2008
) has devel-
oped a notion of
'
interstructuralism
'
.
A key motivation for these alternatives is that the project of reduction fails
because of a fundamental incompatibility - or logical inconsistency - between the
theories of chemistry and the theories of physics, which cannot be overcome even
by a liberal reading of the Nagelian reduction postulates.
Yet scientific structures can be inconsistent - that is a fact already noticed by
Lakatos (
1970
) and reinforced, though gently, in Priest (
2008
) (p. 75). The premise
of this chapter is that we take such inconsistency as a feature of the inter-theory
connection.
The two main questions posed by this stance are of course how we describe such
inconsistent structures as part of an overall whole, as well as how science did end up
that way. The first one is a descriptive, the latter a
s notion of
incorporation
'
'
'
question. This
distinction in descriptive and generative aspects of the problem of inconsistency in
science closely mirrors Reichenbach
generative
'
'
s
1937
distinction between
context of dis-
'
'
covery
. We may conclude that as philosophers of
science, we have to be capable of dealing with such inconsistent structures from
both points of view.
In this chapter, I will develop an approach to solve the generative question, based
on belief revision, which may assist in drawing out the inter-theory relations in
operation. This essay is motivated by the contention that a revision of Nagelian
reduction may rehabilitate the notion of reduction, incorporate a dynamic structure
of belief revision in scientific development, and in doing so largely dissolve the
distinction between reductionism and pluralism. To be precise, I will argue that
Nagelian reductionism is to a significant degree compatible with the pluralist
model, and both models can be based on logics that are capably of specifying the
intertheory relationships rather precisely.
To be applicable to the reduction of chemistry to physics, I claim that such a
revision must on the one hand go back to Nagel
and
context of justification
'
'
'
s original intention for heteroge-
neous reduction, and on the other it must draw on fairly recent logical apparatus to
stake its claim. My aim in this paper is to rehabilitate the concept of reduction in
this sense and argue that the concept is capable, much more capable than was
previously thought, of dealing with sciences that are largely autonomous and even
inconsistent. I will moreover argue that such cases do not necessarily destroy the
unity of science, provided they satisfy some overall criteria regarding how revisions
are done. The interesting outcome of this project is that the scope of pluralism is
thus limited, and there is a large degree of overlap between reductionist and
pluralist positions in the philosophy of chemistry.
'
