Abstract
A chemical substance (CS) is instantiated in the material world by a number of quantities of such substance (QCSs), placed in different locations. A change of location implies a change in the net of relationships entertained by the QCS with the region wherein it is found. This fact entails changes of the ontological status of the CS, as this is not fully determined by the inherent features of the CS and includes a relevant relational contribution. In order to demonstrate this thesis, we have chosen to analyse the status of quantities of a same CS that are synchronically located in different spacetime regions: a synthetic lab, a lab where the QCS is turned into a material, an industrial plant, the market where the QCS gets a price and a dump waste where the QCS is discarded, respectively:
Chemical substance
material
material The use of first-order predicate logic, mereology and locative logic allows carrying out a regimentation process that highlights the ontological commitments implied by the formal expressions through which each element of the aforementioned series can be described. The presence of relational properties discloses the systemic nature of the CS instantiated within a spacetime region. The implications of such an aspect are discussed.
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Notes
The four examples of different locations points to the fact that QCSs can have very different masses, running from grams in a chemical lab to thousands of tons in a plant.
The symbol
was first proposed by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1947, and it is now used in process charts, as “a transportation symbol [that] represents a change of location” (Graham 2004, p. 47).Italics added by the authors.
Glock is eager for this kind of epithets aimed at Quine (see p. 24 and p. 175).
Intuitively, the domain of discourse is the set of all things we wish to talk about; that is, the set of all objects that we can sensibly assign to a variable.
REACH is the Regulation for Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals. It entered into force on 1st June 2007 to give a framework on chemicals of the European Union (EU); The CLP Regulation (for “Classification, Labelling and Packaging”) is a European Union regulation which aligns the European Union system of classification, labelling and packaging chemical substances and mixtures to the Globally Harmonised System, created at the 1992 Rio Conference on Environment and Development. Behind three innocent and purely operational words stays a complex system of classification of risks associated with the use of chemical substances and mixtures.
The Chemical Abstracts Service defines itself as “the world's authority for chemical information”.
Definition by list is a process of identifying all the lower-order concepts that make up a higher-order concept (Chaffee 1991).
Unknown, Variable Composition or Biological.
Quine, in Word and Object, discusses in details the logical gramatics of mass nouns; he wrote: “a mass term in predicative position may be viewed as a general term which is true of each portion of the stuff in question, excluding only the parts too small to count. Thus ‘water’ and ‘sugar’, in the role of general terms, are true of each part of the world’s water or sugar, down to single molecules but not to atoms” (Quine 1960, p. 89). Immediately after this passage, Quine argue about the sentences “Water is a fluid”, “Water is fluid”, “Water flows”, assigning to water (at the macroscopic level) a property that cannot certainly be assigned to a single water molecule (microscopic level).
This frequence refers to the H 162 O molecule, one of the eleven water isotopologues (URL: http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_vibrational_spectrum.html).
Whatever \(\Re\) can be, complying with Quine, when region \({\mathfrak{R}}\) becomes a variable bound by an existential operator, an ontological committment is taken towards it.
This is the case of the ‘Girard and Sandulescu’ reactant, patented in 1936; this reactant had a fundamental role in the chase of cortison (Cerruti 1998).
The grammar form depends on the natural language in use and on the specific property P.
We have chosen to mention the EU definition because, at present, it is the only one with a legal value. Nevertheless, other definitions by Public Authorities are available: an interesting analysis of the various, sometimes contradictory definitions of nanomaterials, was published on November 2014 by three non-governmental organizations: Center for International Environmental Law, European Citizen’s Organization for Standardization, Öko-Institut, “Nanomaterials Definition fact sheet”, available at URL: http://www.ciel.org/Publications/Nano_definition_Nov2014.pdf.
Further on in the text, catalysts are characterized through their performance: "The central level of research and development of heterogeneous catalysts involves the quantification of catalyst performance" on p. 10.
More than 40% of new chemical entities developed in pharmaceutical industry are practically insoluble in water (Savjani et al. 2012).
A deep analysis of the logical aspects and philosophical implication of this distinction may be found in the original text ‘The Concept of Mind’ published in 1949 (Ryle 1949).
Peirce wrote the French text of "Comment rendre nos idees claires" (Peirce 1879) in 1875, as 'linguistic exercise' in view of its participation in the meetings of the Permanent Committee of the International Geodetic Association in Paris 20-29 September. Peirce considered the French original of “How To Make Our Ideas Clear” (Peirce 1878) as the authoritative text for his pragmatic thought (Deledalle 1981).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the anonimus reviewer as well as Paul Needham and José Antonio Chamizo for their critical comments on an earlier draft that led us to substantially revise several passages of the manuscript. We do not expect them to agree with the whole of the present work, but their remarks helped us to sharpen our view on this topic. It remains that any flaw that might still be found in the paper is the exclusive responsibility of the authors.
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Ghibaudi, E., Cerruti, L. Chemical substance, material, product, goods, waste: a changing ontology. Found Chem 19, 97–123 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-017-9281-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-017-9281-8