The Ontological Autonomy of the Chemical World: Facing the Criticisms - Philosophy of Chemistry - page 26

the epistemological but also the ontological commitments that lie behind the concepts
of reduction and emergence (McIntyre 2007b ). However, following a perspective that
has become traditional in the recent philosophy of chemistry, McIntyre accepts with
almost no argumentation that chemical regularities are ontologically dependent upon
underlying physical relationships. He therefore focuses his interest on the merits of the
epistemological interpretation of reduction and emergence.
From this perspective, McIntyre rejects ontological pluralism as a “ bold claim ”
( 2007b , p. 340). According to the author, the reasons for advocating the ontological
autonomy of the chemical world are not sufficient since they are based on insights
about descriptions: “ If they are right that reductive explanation depends on descrip-
tions , it is unclear why this would need to reach all the way to ontology .[ ]

Descriptions are important , but I believe that they need not force us to reconstruct
ontology ” (McIntyre 2007b , p. 340).
Of course, there are no empirical methods to endow ontological claims with a
definitive verification. The ontological reduction of the ontology A to the ontology B,
or even the ontological emergence of A fromB, is usually expressed in counterfactual
terms as

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; but there is noway to decide the truth
value of a counterfactual proposition beyond any doubt. So we always rely on indirect
arguments to justify our commitment to an ontological thesis like that. In particular,
what happens in the epistemological domain can offer good arguments for our
ontological conclusions. In this case, we assess the ontological counterfactual on
the basis of the acceptability of its epistemological counterpart:

if B didn t exist, thenAwouldn texist

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if the theory describ-
ing Bwere wrong, then the theory describingAwould be wrong too

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. This is no longer
an ontological claim, but a claim about what effectively happens in science, and
its truth value depends on the particular relationships between the two theories. And
there are good scientific arguments to believe that such an epistemological sentence is
false; as Jaap van Brakel explicitly asserts: “ If quantum mechanics would turn out
to be wrong , it would not affect all ( or even any ) chemical knowledge about molecules
( bonding , structure , valence and so on ). If molecular chemistry were to turn out to
be wrong , it wouldn

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t disqualify all ( or even any ) knowledge about , say , water ”
(van Brakel 2000 ,p.177).
However, from a non-pluralist realism a further argument against ontological
pluralism can be posed: the history of science supplies many examples of successful
intertheoretic relationships that have been interpreted in ontologically reductionist
terms, and such success is the best proof of ontological reduction. For instance,
temperature is nothing else than mean kinetic energy because, if this were not the
case, the identity of numerical values between the corresponding magnitudes would
lack explanation (McIntyre, personal communication). This inference, when
viewed in a wider context, is a version of the “ no - miracle argument ”, that is, an
inference to the best explanation appealed to by scientific realists to support their
position: the truth of a theory is the best explanation of its empirical success
because, without such a truth-based explanation, that success would be a miracle.
In Putnam

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s words: “ The positive argument for realism is that it is the only
philosophy that doesn

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t make the success of science a miracle ”( 1975 , p. 73).
When transferred to the discussion about intertheoretic relationships, the argument
reads: ontological reduction is the best explanation of the empirical success of

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