Bursten, Julia

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  Julia Bursten Book review: Eric Scerri and Grant Fisher // essays in the philosophy of chemistry  Article (Published version) (Non-refereed)     Original citation: Bursten, Julia (2017) Book review: Eric Scerri and Grant Fisher // essays in the philosophy of chemistry. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science - Review of Books . ISSN 0007-0882  © 2017 The Author  This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/73665/   Available in LSE Research Online: April 2017  LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website.  Eric Scerri and Grant Fisher // Essays in the Philosophyof Chemistry bjpsbooks.wordpress.com /2017/02/28/eric-scerri-and-grant-fisher-essays-in-the-philosophy-of-chemistry/View all posts by bjpsbooksReviewed by Julia BurstenEssays in the Philosophy of ChemistryEric Scerri and Grant Fisher (eds)Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, £38.99ISBN 9780190494599Eric Scerri and Grant Fisher’s edited volume, Essays in the Philosophy of Chemistry boasts a variety ofinsightful perspectives on the application of philosophy of science to issues of chemical interest and theapplication of chemistry to broader debates in philosophy of science. The division of the collection’s sixteenessays into their respective sections is occasionally puzzling, and in a few cases a potential for scholarlydialogue between essays is diminished as a result. So, while there are standout contributions in each section,which are discussed in more detail below, the whole does not transcend the sum of its parts.The essays are subdivided into four sections: ‘History and Philosophy of Chemistry’, ‘Reduction andExplanation’, ‘Metaphysical Issues’, and ‘Theory and Practice’. Of these, ‘History and Philosophy of Chemistry’coheres most strongly. Its three essays all focus on revolutionary periods in the history of chemistry, specificallythe late scientific, chemical, and quantum revolutions, and each approaches its case through historical andhistoriographical details on the way to a philosophical analysis of an aspect of chemistry’s development as adiscipline. Alan Chalmers develops a rigorous study of Robert Boyle’s atomistic philosophy during the latescientific revolution. Nicholas Best’s analysis, ‘What Was Revolutionary about the Chemical Revolution?’ is anespecially careful and thought-provoking perspective on the titular question. Best argues that Lavoisier’s movefrom a small, fixed number of chemical principles to an open-ended list of simple substances generated thefundamental conceptual shift of the chemical revolution, and he supplements this analysis with an engagingdiscussion of the linguistic shifts that accompanied this change.The section on reduction and explanation immediately follows the historical section, and in the crossover anopportunity is lost. The final historical essay, Kostas Gavroglu and Ana Simões’s ‘Philosophical Issues in(Sub)Disciplinary Contexts: The Case of Quantum Chemistry’, addresses inter-theory reduction during thequantum chemical revolution and generates a perceptive assessment of the historical situation. They claim thatthe project of reduction is a tool of physics that is inappropriate to apply in the pursuit of chemical ends. Theirevaluation, which is a fresh and historically anchored take on the perennial question of chemistry’s relation tophysics, is not discussed in any of the essays in the ensuing section. Instead, the reduction and explanationsection juxtaposes two essays on supervenience with contributions on the periodic table, chemical education,and reaction mechanisms.This section is a weak point in the collection. The loose weave of the threads of reduction and explanation hardlyhang the contributions together, and each might have found its target audience more readily in a differentspecialty journal. The supervenience essays, the first by Jean-Pierre Llored and Marina Banchetti-Robino andthe second by Lee McIntyre, each take up an analogy between Jaegwon Kim’s analysis of mental causationrelative to physical causation and the relation between laws in chemistry and laws in physics. While the analogyholds, it is unclear what discussion its acknowledgement is meant to advance, since the field has widelyacknowledged the difference in kind between chemical and physical law. Of the remaining essays in the section,Scerri’s article is a retrospective of his own account of the relation of the periodic table to its quantum–chemicalbasis, in which he defends reductionism against his former account. Noretta Koertge’s essay, ‘Contingencies inChemical Explanation’, is a high point in the section for its perspective on the pedagogical losses that would be1/3incurred by a reduction of chemical theory to physical theory in pre-collegiate educational settings. Finally,chemist Richard Pagni’s study of the notion of a reaction mechanism runs that concept up against a variety ofhigh-profile ideas from general philosophy of science in order to develop an account of what a reactionmechanism is. He considers both Glennan’s ([1996]) and Machamer, Darden, and Craver’s ([2000]) accounts ofmechanism as applicable to reaction mechanisms; the project of evaluating mechanistic models of reactionsaccording to explanatory power; and the question of whether reaction mechanisms are falsifiable. Surprisingly,he gives only the barest lip service to extant philosophical theories of reaction mechanisms, such as MarkGoodwin’s ([2011]) sophisticated account of the conceptual and explanatory role of reaction mechanisms inorganic chemistry, which is an unfortunate oversight, since it would have provided a more apt foil for Pagni’sdiscussion than those he highlights from general philosophy of science.The next section, ‘Metaphysical Issues’, contains four chapters and, overall, is more successful. As with theprevious section, though, there were missed opportunities for productive discussion among the individualessays. The section contains three case studies in the chemical perspective on issues in general philosophy ofscience: causation, realism, and natural kinds. The remaining essay in the section, chemist Joseph Earley’s‘How Properties Hold Together in Substances’, takes a more naturalistic approach to chemical metaphysics bygenerating a taxonomy of chemical properties on the way to a philosophically and historically informedmetaphysics of chemistry. Earley articulates three kinds of chemical properties and four historically informedmodes of closure among relations of chemical properties and concepts in chemical theory. This essay reads likea prospectus for a monograph on Earley’s own metaphysics of chemistry, one that would make a welcomecontribution to the field.In ‘Causality in Chemistry’, Rom Harré considers what notions of cause operate in the context of chemicalsciences. Hasok Chang’s ‘Scientific Realism and Chemistry’ is a gauzily veiled tutorial in Chang’s particularbrand of realism, which he calls ‘active realism’ and ties to his notion of epistemic pluralism. Chang walksreaders through his discontent with various contemporary theories of realism and offers characteristically wittycorrectives to Ian Hacking’s ([1983]) and Stathis Psillos’ ([ 1999]) accounts (for example, on Hacking’s entityrealism: ‘You may be able to spray something without knowing much about what it is that you’re spraying’, p.243). These discussions give way to a summary of active realism, which is drawn from Chang’s pluralisticaccount of the history of chemical theory and practice. The chapter is welcome for its succinct overview ofChang’s position in the realism debate and his explanation of how chemistry contributes to his view, but theemphasis is certainly on the former, rather than the latter, subject in the title. Finally, Robin Hendry’s ‘NaturalKinds in Chemistry’ provides a useful primer on the historical trajectory and present state of that subject, detailingboth the connection to the causal-baptism theory of naming and the debate within philosophy of chemistrybetween microstructural and macroscopic conceptions of a substance. This chapter should find a happy home inphilosophy of science syllabi and reading lists looking to include connections between chemistry and broaderphilosophical issues, and it is an approachable article that introduces readers to the view of chemical kinds foundthroughout Hendry’s oeuvre.The collection’s final section, dubbed ‘Theory and Practice’, begins with Hinne Hettema’s essay, ‘Chemistry and“The Theoretician’s Dilemma”’. As one would expect from such a title, the essay considers theoretical objects inchemistry. The dilemma Hettema uses to motivate his chapter—namely, Hempel’s ([1958]) worry about theeliminability of theoretical terms—is more epistemological than it is metaphysical, which nominally distinguishesit from the metaphysical concerns of the previous section. However, Hettema’s essay is primarily targeted at themetaphysical end of the range of problems that arise from the dilemma, particularly at those issues surroundingthe ontological status of theoretical objects. His central concern is with the notion of a chemical object, and hismain claim, developed through a series of fascinating case studies, is that theoretical and conceptual objects inchemistry stand in a plurality of grounding relationships to the target systems they aim to represent and describe.As such, the chapter is more closely aligned with Chang’s epistemic pluralism and active realism projects, andwith the concerns of the metaphysical issues section more broadly, than with the other contributions in the‘Theory and Practice’.In the next essay, chemist Guillermo Restreppo applies Mary Jo Nye’s ([1993]) criteria for the demarcation of adiscipline to mathematical chemistry, successfully arguing that it constitutes a discipline unto itself. ReinVihalemm’s posthumously published treatise on the scientific character of chemistry is thought-provoking and a2/3fitting legacy. It pairs well with Restreppo’s article, though its reflections on the relation between physics andchemistry would have been better complemented by Gavroglu and Simões’s and Koertge’s essays thanHettema’s and Fisher’s.Fisher’s chapter, ‘Divergence, Diagnostics, and a Dichotomy of Methods’, draws on an extended case study ofthe Woodward–Hoffmann rules for predicting stereochemistry in pericyclic reactions in organic chemistry. TheWoodward–Hoffmann rules are widely recognized in chemistry as exceptionally explanatory, making use of theconcept of molecular orbitals and orbital symmetry to develop systematic, accurate rationalizations of allowedand disallowed geometries. Fisher’s theory of diagnostics in computational chemistry draws on thecontemporary literature in modelling and simulations from philosophy of science to explicate this power of theWoodward–Hoffmann rules in terms of their contribution to chemical understanding. He succeeds in making anovel contribution to the modelling and simulation literature in the form of his account of diagnostics, whichunites and refines a variety of accounts of the epistemology and methodology of computer simulations. Thisessay is also exceptionally naturalistic among the contributions in the collection. That is, Fisher motivates hisphilosophical queries from problems native to the particularities of chemical theory and practice, as opposed toapplying puzzles in general philosophy of science to chemical cases, which was the modus operandi of many ofthe chapters. The success of this essay is a high point of the book and a promising herald of what may come inthe next phase of philosophy of chemistry’s growth as a discipline.Overall, a smattering of standout articles, particularly those by Best and Fisher, make this collection aworthwhile, but not a must-have, addition to a philosopher of chemistry’s bookshelf. However, when taken as awhole, it is a collection in want of some curation, a custodial feat that is not achieved by the perfunctoryintroduction. The organization of the essays works against a greater understanding of issues both native andcentral to the philosophy of chemistry, and there is little dialogue among the individual contributions. Or, to putthe point in the language of the volume’s subject, no synthesis proceeded from the component reagents of theindividual contributions.Julia R. BurstenDepartment of PhilosophyUniversity of Kentuckyjrbursten@uky.eduReferencesGlennan, S. [1996]: ‘Mechanism and the Nature of Causation’, Erkenntnis, 44.Goodwin, W. [2011]: ‘Mechanisms and Chemical Reaction’, in A. Woody, R. F. Hendry, and P. Needham (eds),Handbook of the Philosophy of Science: Philosophy of Chemistry , Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 309Hacking, I. [1983]: Representing and Intervening, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Hempel, C. [1958]: ‘The Theoretician’s Dilemma’, in H. Feigl, M. Scriven and G. Maxwell ( eds), Concepts,Theories, and the Mind–Body Problem, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 37–97.Machamer, P., Darden, L. and Craver, C. [2000]: ‘Thinking about Mechanisms’, Philosophy of Science, 67, pp.1–25.Nye, M. [1993]: From Chemical Philosophy to Theoretical Chemistry: Dynamics of Matter and Dynamics ofDisciplines, 1800–1950, Berkeley: University of California Press.Psillos, S. [1999]: Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth, London: Routledge.3/3

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