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cannot be conducted for epistemic purposes, which would be “instrumentalism”,
but must be a purpose-free activity. The debate has, of course, focused on
distinguishing the latest theories of mathematical and high energy physics (and
strangely begun in the USA during the Cold War, when exactly that kind of
research was heavily funded for military purposes). By excluding any purpose,
including epistemic aims, they have created a very distorted image of science. In
contrast, all scientists pursue aims, epistemic or not, and they use terms like “true”
much more flexibly, depending on the discipline and always on how much the
corresponding concepts have been successful in pursuing various epistemic aims.
Moreover, by distinguishing the theories of physics among the vast plurality of
research fields, “scientific realists” have not only repeated the received one-sided
focus on theoretical science, but also tried to reformulate a version of physicalism.
“Scientific realism” is thus only the latest desperate movement to uphold the flag of
physicalist monism in the pluralist world of science.
It is therefore overdue to drop “scientific realism” and look for a concept of
realism that is meaningful for the pluralist constitution of science in general and
chemistry in particular. Hasok Chang (
2012
, ch. 4.2) has already argued in a similar
vein that realism is not a matter of belief in the truth of a theory, but an active
commitment to the pluralist pursuit of knowledge of the external reality. I will take
a slightly different approach in the following sketch (for more details, see
Schummer
1996
) by returning to the original meanings of realism. In philosophy,
realism has been a position opposed to either idealism, nominalism, or skepticism,
depending on whether the reality of the outer world or the correspondence of our
concepts and knowledge to the world is denied. If we find in the practice of
chemistry institutionalized traits that conflict with those views, we have some
clues of what realism means here.
Idealists believe in the reality of ideas or, more radically, that only ideas form
reality. The view has thrived particularly within rationalism, which rejects sense
perceptions and experience as reliable sources of knowledge, and instead seeks
contact to its reality through intuition and logical constraints of reasoning. While
that undoubtedly plays a role for chemists, most of them seek contact to reality first
of all through experimentation in the double meaning of the word. One the one
hand, they probe the behavior of material samples under the sophisticated control of
the context in order to test or modify a conjecture. On the other, they playfully or
systematically explore the behavior of material samples in search for unexpected,
surprising results. In both cases, the behavior of the probed material world is
considered independent from human will and planning, a material response rather
than the intuition of an idea. That is a clear indication that experimental chemists
reject idealism and instead favor the corresponding realism as their institutionalized
metaphysical view. This kind of realism is fully compatible with methodological
pluralism, because it does not matter what particular aim is pursued or what kind of
conceptual framework is presupposed, as long as the general rules of experimenta-
tion are observed. In theoretical and computational chemistry, where results depend
solely on the theoretical input or mathematical algorithms and some given data, that
differs however. Thus, within the overall pluralism of chemistry, metaphysical
