Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
eliminating competitors. While the received philosophies of science have
presupposed strict conceptual unity in their own pictures, including Kuhn
snotion
that temporary crises turn into new types of “normal science”, the actual science is the
result of an ongoing process of fragmentation, because that has always been the
obvious way of solving conceptual disagreement under the pressure of growth.
How much the received philosophy has left science in the dark comes to the fore
in the manifold obstacles faced by interdisciplinary research. What once split into
parts frequently out of historically contingent reasons, is later required to collabo-
rate on cross-disciplinary issues that are increasingly posed from science policy.
The barriers of cross-disciplinary communication are enormous (Schummer
2008
).
They do not only include differences in knowledge and expertise, which a smart
division of labor management could possibly fix. In addition, the same terms, like
“molecules”, frequently have different meanings in the disciplines, depending on
the theoretical context they are embedded in, which easily results in misunder-
standing and confusion. Moreover, disciplines differ in the way they approach a
problem, what they consider a satisfying answer or sound argument, and, more
generally, what counts as important research questions worth pursuing. Thus,
besides differences in knowledge and linguistic meaning, disciplines have distinc-
tive ideas about methods and epistemic values that have steadily been developed
through internal discussion.
One cannot solve those serious problems by claiming that the world consists of a
certain set of building blocks to be investigated by a universal scientific method, if
the building blocks and methods happened to be just from a single discipline. It
does not help either to hope that all problems will disappear in the future by a not
yet found universal Theory of Everything. Those who do so close their eyes to the
fact that the development of modern science has been over several centuries a
fragmentation into an ever growing plurality of scientific approaches with no
interest at all in a universal theory, but strong inclinations and inner forces to
continue so in the foreseeable future. Philosophy of science would be better off,
and more useful, if it acknowledges and studies the pluralistic constitution of
science.
'
5.3 The Pluralist Constitution of Chemistry
What has been said about science in general correspondingly holds for a
mega-discipline such as chemistry. Regarding the number of publications,
chemistry has long been as big as the rest of the sciences altogether (Schummer
2004
). The production of more than a million publications per year requires a
breakdown into hundreds of specialized fields, if results are to be read and discussed
in a scholarly manner. Many divisions resulted from disagreement on conceptual
frameworks in the past. However, even if such breakdowns were once systemati-
cally achieved, later research frequently blurs or overcomes clear-cut boundaries, as
the outdated distinction between organic and inorganic chemistry illustrates. Rather
