Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
framework independent and deep along both the axes of generality and physical
basis (ibid, pp. 152-154).
Black boxed explanations are pertinent to chemistry because one might interpret
an explanation in chemistry as black boxed and standing alone only in virtue of its
framework relative conceptual basis - only in virtue of the conceptual and linguistic
resources of chemistry. While such “autonomous” chemical explanations may
causally entail their explanatory targets, they do not do so independently of their
framework because they merely substitute for the “real” mechanism spelled out
at the fundamental physical level. Strevens
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ontological commitments are also
illustrated by his treatment of causal laws in the special sciences. For example,
explanations in biology and chemistry are offered without citing physical covering
laws. But the shallowness of depth, Strevens insists, is only “apparent” because a
chemical causal law is “identical to the components of the causal model that
explains it” - identical to the “underlying physical mechanism” (assuming appro-
priate background conditions and correspondence rules linking low with high level
statements or properties) except for parts that might be merely not “spelled out”, or
made “fully explicit” (ibid, p. 130). He argues that all causal influence is funda-
mental (low-level) physical causal influence. Explanations stand alone when high-
level causal laws are abstractions, purged of the irrelevant low-level (physical)
causal details such that they contain only those properties and processes relevant to
the entailment of the regularity or event to be explained.
This is grist to Strevens
ontological mill. His account of deep standalone
explanation is a commitment to physicalism based on “empirical fact” not a priori
argument (ibid, p. 82). Strevens
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reductionism is a clearly an issue that might meet
with resistance, but it is not the purpose of this contribution to engage with
reduction save for its connection to idealization and explanation. What
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s missing
in Strevens account is a clear sense in which we could apply Strevens
ideas to an
actual case of explanation in chemistry because the same problem concerning the
explanatory function of idealization in chemistry arises again. If one assumes a
physical basis for all causal influence and one cannot derive the properties and
processes attributed to chemistry, then the physical extension of at least some terms
of causal explanatory importance to chemistry, like “molecular shape”, “bond”,
“orbital”, etc., seems to be an empty set. If one were to conclude that models
employing such terms are explanatory in the communicative sense only, then even
this option seems to be blocked. Idealization is the distortion of actual but causally
irrelevant factors whose cognitive function is to at least raise awareness of those
factors that play no role in the causal entailment of the explanatory target. On a
reductionist view, since the physical extension of at least some chemical terms is an
empty set, it follows that the conceptual resources of chemistry often fail pick out
not only causal facts about the world but also communicatively significant but
causally irrelevant aspects of their target systems. In other words it turns out that on
the kairetic account, much of the causal resources of chemistry are neither
difference-makers nor non-difference-makers. So, it seems that chemistry does
not explain in either the ontological or communicative senses of explanation as
Strevens construes them.
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