Chemistry Reference
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present within a particular
s
terminology (
1974
), we could claim that the
ceteris paribus
clause turns out to be
a “hinge” around which most inference strategies revolve. If this “hinge clause”
seems to be a condition of possibility of making inferences, is its application
universal or local?
To address this problem, we shall first characterize the activities of chemists.
If the “properties” of bodies are, even partly, constituted by the mode of access, for
example by an instrument, within a chemical transformation, it seems that the
sentence “all other things being equal” should be understood in a specific way.
What sometimes appears to be a universal clause or metaprinciple turns out to be a
local hinge that a “distributed epistemology” (Bachelard
1940
), enables us to
clarify and explore further.
It is worth noting that chemists tend to consider chemicals to be active bodies
endowed with capacities of action in order to explain the consequences of their
introduction into a complex of material stuffs. Chemists always deal with and act
upon heterogeneous and active “matters.” This way of looking at chemical
reactions is at odds with the search for a coherent understanding of passive matter
in general
. In the framework of both context-sensitive and active bodies,
a bearer
of an attribute does not necessarily have an
“
identity
”
independent of that attribute
throughout the transformation involved
. Furthermore, if many parameters such
as the chemical composition of a mixture, the surface of a chromatographic column,
the polarity and the flow of the solvent, and the temperature, to quote but a few
factors, are bound to change during a chromatographic analysis, another question
arises: How is it possible to control for all of the independent variables other than
the one under study, so that the effect of a
single
independent variable on the
dependent variables can be isolated?
We do not propose to set out a ready-to-use philosophical analysis from
the outset but, on the contrary, to identify what a philosophical enquiry should
integrate into its premises in order to investigate the meaning of the
ceteris paribus
clause in chemistry.
We shall explore the domain of analytical chemistry, and especially that of
quality control. This will allow us to emphasize that the application of the
ceteris
paribus
clause implies that we adapt our understanding of what is “stabilized”
within such practices. Both the “object” on which the clause rests and the meaning
of the clause itself change together in the context of chemistry. We shall demon-
strate that what is stabilized in a chemical preparation is the response of the whole
complex that holds the apparatus, the chemical bodies and the microstructures of
interest, the methods being used, and the surroundings solvents or other extrinsic
chemical bodies and the gravitational and electromagnetic background. The infer-
ence is thus about this complex and certainly not about chemicals or single factors
in “isolation.”
scientific survey. Drawing on Wittgenstein
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