Abstract
The autonomy of chemistry and the legitimacy of the philosophy of chemistry are usually discussed in the context of the issue of reduction of chemistry to physics, and defended making use of the failure of reductionistic claims. Until quite recent times a rather widespread viewpoint was, however, that the failure of reductionistic claims concerns actually epistemological aspect of reduction only, but the ontological reduction of chemistry to physics cannot be denied. The new problems of the autonomy of chemistry in the context of reductionism seem to be ontological and metaphysical. In the present paper it is argued that there is no need for some kind of metaphysical-ontological underpinning for rejection of the secondary positions of chemistry and philosophy of chemistry with respect to physics and philosophy of physics. The issue can be elucidated in terms of the philosophy of science accepting practical realism (also known by other names).
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Notes
See (Vihalemm 2003b: 62–65), where this difference is educed: the concept of a natural kind has an exact meaning in the conceptual framework of philosophy of science together with the concepts of laws of nature, scientific explanation, scientific theory. For instance, chemical elements can be regarded as natural kinds, as they can be identified as scientific-theoretical entities in the periodic law and periodic system. In “pure philosophy” this kind of concepts are missing and this is the reason why the problem of natural kinds remains indefinite as well.
See, e.g., (Hacking 1983: Part B). Hacking’s experimental realism, that might be regarded―in my opinion―as the core of practical realism, seems to be best summarized by him as follows:
Reality is bigger than us. The best kinds of evidence for the reality of a postulated or inferred entity is that we can begin to measure it or otherwise understand its causal powers. The best evidence, in turn, that we have this kind of understanding is that we can set out, from scratch, to build machines that will work fairly reliably, taking advantage of this or that causal nexus. Hence, engineering, not theorizing, is the best proof of scientific realism about entities. (Hacking 1983: 274).
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Acknowledgments
Previous versions of this paper were read at the 10th Summer Symposium (2006, in Split, Croatia) and at the 12th Summer Symposium (2008, in Coburg, Germany) of the International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry (ISPC). The author would like to thank the participants of these symposia for discussion. I am especially grateful to Rom Harré, Jaap van Brakel, Eric Scerri, Eugen Schwarz, Olimpia Lombardi and Martin Labarca for the correspondence concerning my paper also after the event. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of this journal whose comments helped me to improve this article. The writing of this article was partly supported by the Estonian Science Foundation Grant No. 7946.
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Vihalemm, R. The autonomy of chemistry: old and new problems. Found Chem 13, 97–107 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-010-9094-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-010-9094-5