Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
intertheoretic relationships because, without a reduction-based explanation, that
empirical success would be a miracle.
As it is well known in the context of the general philosophy of science, the
no-miracle argument has received different and weighty responses, all of them
directed to show that empirical success is not a sufficiently good argument for
truth. One of them is based on the so-called
about the
underdetermination of theory by evidence
(Duhem
1906
;Quine
1951
): two theories
may be empirically equivalent
'
Duhem-Quine thesis
'
and thus equally successful from the empirical
viewpoint
but ontologically incompatible and, therefore, they cannot be both true.
Another objection raised against the no-miracle argument, which is particularly
relevant to our discussion, is the
pessimistic meta
-
induction
, which shows that
many theories considered successful in their own times were later finally discarded.
Forinstance,LarryLaudan(
1981
) reports historical cases of scientific theories that,
in spite of their success in the past, are considered false at present. As a consequence,
there is no reason to believe that our present best theories will not have the same fate.
The general conclusion is that empirical success does not guarantee truth.
The pessimistic meta-induction can be easily transferred to the intertheoretic case:
analogously to the historical answer in the original context, the history of science also
shows how intertheoretic links, empirically successful at a certain time, were some-
times later replaced due to the modification of one of the poles of the relationship. The
paradigmatic example is the link between thermodynamics and the theory describing
the supposedly underlying domain. In this case, the “fundamental” theory changed
from caloric theory, to classical mechanics and, finally, to quantum mechanics
and
the intertheoretic links changed with it; however, the “phenomenological” theory
macroscopic thermodynamics
remained immune to the modifications during the
entire historical process. Therefore, on the basis of the intertheoretic version of the
pessimistic meta-induction, we can conclude that there is no reason to expect that our
best intertheoretic relationships will not be abandoned in the future because of the
failure of the supposedly fundamental theory. The general conclusion in this case is that
the empirical success of an intertheoretic relationship is not sufficient to support the
assumption of the ontological reduction of some entities to others more fundamental.
What is more, in the case of the relationship between chemistry and physics, the
claim of ontological reduction is even weaker due to the epistemological irreduc-
ibility of the theories of chemistry to the descriptions supplied by physics. In this
scenario, the insistence on the ontological dependence of chemical entities and
regularities upon the physical domain is not justified: the burden of proof lies on the
non-pluralist realist.
3.4 The Role of Practice of Science
In a brief and very well written article, Alexander Manafu (
2013
) discusses, from a
general viewpoint, the proposal advanced in the original work on ontological
pluralism (Lombardi and Labarca
2005
). The author does not call into question
