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The Gulf between chemistry and philosophy of chemistry, then and now

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Abstract

The article aims to introduce the sub-discipline of the philosophy of chemistry to the chemical community at large. The origins of the field are briefly reviewed including some possible causes for the delay in its arrival into the philosophy of science. Some critical remarks are leveled at some of the current work that has been conducted, and reasons for the gulf between philosophy of chemistry and mainstream chemistry are explored. Finally, a novel approach consists of a close examination of how scientific concepts evolve. This theme is discussed with the aid of the work of the early twentieth century amateur scientists Anton van den Broek, who first proposed that the elements in the periodic table should be ordered according to their atomic numbers rather than their atomic weights.

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Notes

  1. Foundations of Chemistry, http://www.springer.com/philosophy/epistemology+and+philosophy+of+science/journal/10698

  2. Foundations of Chemistry, http://www.springer.com/philosophy/epistemology+and+philosophy+of+science/journal/10698

  3. Hyle – International Journal for the Philosophy of Chemistry, http://www.hyle.org/

  4. International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry, https://sites.google.com/site/socphilchem/

  5. E. Serrelli, entry for Philosophy of Biology in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/biology/

  6. See for example, P. Atkins, Galileo’s Finger, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004.

  7. M. Weisberg, P. Needham, R. Hendry, Philosophy of Chemistry, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chemistry/. Also see the following critique of the article in E.R. Scerri, Editorial 37, Foundations of Chemistry, 13, 1–7, 2011.

  8. First published in 1934 in German as Logik der Forschung, first English translation 1959

  9. This situation persists in spite of heroic efforts made by authors in such journals as Science & Education, https://link.springer.com/journal/11191

  10. For readers who may not be familiar with Kuhn’s term incommensurability, it is intended to mean that some scientific theories (concepts, paradigms, worldviews) separated by a scientific revolution have “no common measure” and cannot therefore be rationally compared.

  11. An early proponent of this view was the philosopher Paul Feyerabend. More recently, it has been championed by certain sociologists of science. H.M., Collins, Stages in the Empirical Program of Relativism – Introduction, Social Studies of Science, 11, 3–10, 1981.

  12. E.R. Scerri, A Tale of Seven Scientists and A New Philosophy of Science, Oxford University Press, New York, 2016. Other little known chemists and physicists whose work is examined in this book include John Nicholson, Richard Abegg, Charles Bury, John Main Smith, Edmund Stoner, and Charles Janet.

  13. A more detailed version of the work of van den Broek appears in the book cited in reference 21 on which this section has been based.

  14. Ibid, chapter 3.

  15. Ibid, p. 56.

  16. The final element known at the time was uranium whose atomic weight was thought to be 240, thus accounting for the limiting value chosen by Van den Broek.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Ibid, p. 619,

  19. Ibid. Table appears on p. 373.

  20. E.R. Scerri, A Tale of Seven Scientists and A New Philosophy of Science, Oxford University Press, New York, 2016

  21. E.R. Scerri, Op Ed in Los Angeles Times, February 20th, 2017.

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  1. Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

    Eric Scerri

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Correspondence to Eric Scerri.

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This paper is dedicated to Professor Lou Massa on the occasion of his Festschrift.

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Scerri, E. The Gulf between chemistry and philosophy of chemistry, then and now. Struct Chem 28, 1599–1605 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11224-017-0948-5

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