Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
is accepted, many mainstream philosophical debates that are based on monism
become futile, of which I discuss “laws of nature”, “reductionism”, and “scientific
realism” (Sects.
5.4
,
5.5
, and
5.6
). That shifts philosophical debates to more useful
issues, such as the methodology of models, improving interdisciplinarity, and
institutionalized forms of philosophical realism. The conclusion summarizes
these and other advantages of pluralism as the better way of doing and understand-
ing science.
5.2 The Pluralist Constitution of Science
Science as a whole is a pluralist enterprise. At least since the nineteenth-century, it
regularly splits into different disciplines, subdisciplines, and research fields. Grow-
ing on average at an annual rate of 4-5 % over several centuries, the numbers of
papers, scientists, fields, etc. roughly double every 15 years (Price
1961
). As a
human endeavor science depends on the limited intellectual and social capacities of
its members. If you want to keep up with the latest work, you can read at most a few
hundred or thousand papers a year. However, in chemistry alone more than one
million publications appear annually, covered by Chemical Abstracts. If you want
to find agreements with your colleagues on what are important research questions,
what needs to be done or improved in the future, or what should be standards of
sound argumentation and experimentation, you can personally discuss all that with
hardly more than a few hundred colleagues despite modern communication tech-
nology. As long as science grows and reading and discussing are prerequisites of
doing research, the fragmentation of science is an unavoidable process.
On the one hand, the ongoing splitting follows a division of labor. Different
subdisciplines study different subject matter and develop their own research ques-
tions as well as their corresponding conceptual apparatus and methods. Sometimes
they focus on entirely different objects, as once did organic and inorganic chemistry,
such that under the common umbrella of general chemistry the fields, neatly sepa-
rated, could complement each other without competition or disagreement - before the
rise of organometallic, metalorganic, bioinorganic, biometalorganic etc. chemistry.
Or, as in kinetics and thermodynamics, they study the same objects, i.e. chemical
reactions, from different but complementary perspectives. On the other hand, a field
can also split up because there is disagreement on the conceptual framework, such
that one group prefers a new frame whereas the other sticks to the old one. A case in
point is the mid-twentieth-century separation of molecular biology from biochemis-
try. While the latter continued the study of chemical processes in living organisms in
terms of reaction pathways, i.e. the transformation and migration of matter, the
former built its disciplinary identity on the conceptual framework of information
transfer (Fox Keller
2000
). Given the rapid growth and unavoidable fragmentation of
science, it is likely that most cases of conceptual disagreement and conflict follow this
kind of pattern. That is in strong contrast to the winner/looser stories of Popper, Kuhn
and the like, who assumed that science would always (have to) pursue unity by
