Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
in the generalised Nagel-Schaffner model. Specifically, we can put more precision
on the notions of
typical idealisations
,
boundary conditions
,
approximately
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the same
, all of which enter into the formulation of the
generalised Nagel-Schaffner model.
As a sidenote, the characterisation in terms of this formal framework has additional
benefits: it opens the theories of chemistry up to formal treatments in the philosophy
of science that focus on other formal aspects of theories such as verisimilitude.
It thus appears that a practical theory of chemistry can, with a little formal help,
be reconstructed in terms of philosophical notions such as set theoretic structures
and conceptual spaces that are fruitful starting points for the general philosophy of
science, and that may have further import for discussions about pluralism and the
unity of science.
This result forms a strong motivation for a further study of the theories of
chemistry by philosophers of science, and also illustrates that chemistry as a
science has interesting philosophical dimensions. Finally, in an attempt to answer
the question as to whether
and
analogy relation
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, it may be
concluded that they are indeed, though probably not with the methods available
to philosophers of science in 1937.
these methods
are
fundamentally sound
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2.5 Conclusion
I have argued that the Nagelian theory of reduction can well be retrofitted to a belief
revision approach based on set theoretic structures and conceptual spaces. Doing so
leads to a picture of reduction that has interesting consequences for our notions of
unity of science. The unity of science under this reconstruction is reconstructed in a
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dappled
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sense as a set of specific reasoning strategies that transform
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quantum
theory
, a generic theory without a firm set-theoretic formulation, into a highly
specific theory of chemistry.
It is important to recognise that the belief revision approach is a generative
theory, and has a descriptive counterpart - that is, belief revision lets us determine
the sort of reasoning that led to a particular model, but is perhaps less capable of
describing the end-result with the necessary level of detail. That latter step, how-
ever, falls outside the scope of this paper.
It would seem that this approach is capable of reconciling both our intuitions
about how reduction should work in practice with actual examples from science,
and show that a number of confusing debates in the philosophy of chemistry could
have been avoided altogether.
This reconstruction of the notion of reduction fulfills a number of interesting
desiderata: it supports the unity of science as an overall epistemic structure, and can
make sense of some actual problematic cases of reduction from the philosophy of
chemistry. The limitation on incommensurability inherent in this approach also limits
the scope of feasible pluralisms in the philosophy of chemistry, and focuses our attention
instead on a more precise formal characterisation of the resulting epistemic structures.
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