Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
realism has been institutionalized in the methodology of experimental research,
while theoretical branches follow a style that is more akin to idealism. The issue is
no longer a matter of philosophical interpretation or taste, as it might have been still
in the eighteenth century, but depends on what specific research field we look upon.
The second traditional opposition to realism, nominalism, claims that our classi-
ficatory concepts, while being useful ideas for certain human purposes, have no
correspondence in the world. We might want to divide up the world into kinds and
sub-kinds, but such divisions are only mental constructs rather than kinds whose
differences are founded in nature. All that really exists are individual pieces of matter
that can at best be related to each other by similarity relations. Originating in
medieval metaphysics, it became a powerful modern position from the mechanical
philosophy to Logical Positivism, which is difficult to refute in natural history.
However, chemistry has long solved the issue for its own purposes by experimentally
adjusting the material world in the laboratory to its concepts (Sect.
5.4
). We divide up
mixtures not by mental but by experimental analysis into compounds, and corre-
spondingly compounds into its constitutional elements. And conversely, we make
compounds not by mental compositions of properties, but by chemical synthesis.
Although the results are not ultimately perfect for practical reasons, as mentioned
before, the species thus created are reproducible in any laboratory at any time. No
chemist denies that chemical elements and substances are real kinds rather than
mental constructs. Even further, if chemists conceive of theoretical entities,
i.e. chemical substances that do not exist yet, they reasonably believe in their
potential reality, which is the most convincing case of “entity realism” (Schummer
1996
, chap. 6), because they know how to realize them in the laboratory by theoret-
ically guided synthesis, as has been done millions of times before. In sum, conceptual
realism, as opposed to nominalism, is an unquestioned position in chemistry because
it is deeply rooted in its experimental practice. As long as the general rules of
experimentation are observed, species can be developed for different purposes and
by different methods, such that conceptual realism is also compatible with pluralism.
The third view opposed to realism, skepticism, denies that we can achieve reliable
knowledge about the world. From the aforementioned it immediately follows that this
is an untenable position in chemistry. Because chemists, unlike mathematicians or
philosophers, seek contact to the outer world through experimentation and because
their concepts to describe the world are operationally based in experimental practice,
which can be reproduced by anyone at any time, the knowledge thus achieved meets all
conditions of objectivity and reliability one can reasonably wish for. Although that, of
course, refers only to very basic experimental knowledge, it suffice to refute skepticism
in general and to establish a foundation for epistemological realism. We can go further,
however, if we drop the idea that theories must be either true or false, which is so
vulnerable to skepticism. In the experimental sciences, theories or models, or more
generally conceptual frameworks, are not the end but the means of science. Similar to
the experimental apparatus, they are tools to probe the world, to pose precise questions
for which we expect precise and reliable answers. Like any tools, their quality is a
matter of degree, depending on their inner construction (conceptual clarity, logical
consistency, degree of sophistication, easiness of use, etc.), and they can be more useful
