Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
nominalism that Pierce repeatedly attacked. Some chemists (especially those
exposed to philosophy) may formally endorse nominalistic views, but chemists
generally guide their professional activities by understandings similar to those of
Bishop and Atmanspacher (
2006
, 1755), who describe
contextual property emer-
gence—
by which upper-level properties derive from the
context of constraints
on a
system as well as from properties of less-extensive entities that constitute underly-
ing levels. Upper-level constraints typically remove degeneracies that characterize
lower-level situations and thus lead to
stable
states. Such constraints are designated
contextual determinants
.
Olimpia Lombardi and Martin Labarca (
2005
)
16
maintained that entities at
several chemical levels should be taken with full seriousness. In so doing, they
retained the ontological/epistemological distinction, used Kantian vocabulary, and,
in passing, indicated that “Noumenal Reality” exerts influence (their Figure 1,
p. 145). Although these authors expressly rejected the notion of
The God
s-Eye
'
'
View
they did not draw the inference that all that exists for us to know is
how
things behave
under this or that set of circumstances. Dewey might consider use of
inherited vocabulary by these authors to exemplify philosophical “un-modernism.”
However, in this case, this conservatism does not appear to have influenced the
authors
'
argument.
Meanings of important terms often change greatly across the centuries, but
chemists and philosophers of chemistry tend to anachronistically use more-recent
meanings for important words in interpretation of earlier authors who had quite
different understanding of the connotation of the same terms. For instance, the
Greek words
hyle
,
aitia
,and
ousia
are now generally translated into English as
'
'
respectively—but the contemporary meanings
of each of those terms to English-speakers is quite different from the significance
the original words had for ancient Greeks (and often also for authors in other
historical periods). In particular, the designation “matter-theory” that historians of
chymistry routinely use (e.g. Garber
2007
) to describe a fundamental outlook on
nature seems unfortunate, since this usage employs a quite-modern notion of
'
matter
'
(as a type of independent existent) that would not have been recognized
by Medieval and Early-Renaissance workers—for whom
'
matter
'
matter,
cause,
and
substance,
''
'
'
'
(
hyle
) would
have been a more or less abstract
principle
(
arch¯
) rather than an independently-
'
'
existent substance (
ousia
).
As Dewey (
2012
, 159 ff.) points out, continued use of obsolete categories may
raise philosophic problems difficult to recognize and to repair—but a different but
parallel error may be even more harmful. Novel findings that do not fit preexisting
categorial schemes may be effectively invisible—remain ignored for some time.
Philosophy of chemistry has no immunity from this difficulty.
16
See also Liwowicz and Lombardi (
2013
).
