Philosophy for Chemists

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Science is a striking, successful and powerful feature of contemporary human cultures: it has transformed lives, enabled great technological feats and often revealed the world to be a much stranger place than appearances suggest. But what is science, really, and how and why has it been so successful? This 6 week course aims to introduce graduate students to some main themes in the philosophy of science generally, and the philosophy of chemistry in particular.

Number of sessions: 6

Week 1: Demarcation and Natural Kinds Is there some set of conditions in virtue of which science is scientific? Does it, or the stuff of scientific study, have an essence? That is, is there something distinctive about scientific investigation which distinguishes it from other things humans do?

Week 2: Theory Change in Science In the past scientists have abandoned apparently successful theories for what we hope are better, more successful theories. But can we really make such comparisons? And do scientists change their minds because the new theories are more likely to be true, or because the new theories are, say, politically expedient—or do the believers in the old theory just die out?

Week 3: Measurement Measurement is the foundation of any quantitative empirical science. We make all sorts of measurements routinely in the lab, but there are actually deep difficulties in knowing if our instruments correctly measure what we intend to measure. The epistemological issues involved here will be discussed through various scientific examples, including temperature and pH.

Week 4: Realism Do scientific theories give us the true picture of reality, or are they just useful models of computation and prediction? And how would we be able to know if our theories are “really true”? To explore these issues, we will take a close look at the history of atomic-molecular chemistry in the 19th century, during which a great deal of knowledge was gained about the structure of complex molecules even though chemists had no direct access to them.

Week 5: Reductionism Is chemistry just applied physics? Does all science ultimately boil down to fundamental physics? This is a pertinent issue to all areas of science, but we will look at it especially through the application of quantum mechanics to chemistry. We will also look at the history of earlier attempts to reduce chemistry to physics.

Week 6: Scientific Objectivity A hallmark of science is supposed to be its objectivity: the power of scientific claims is not intended to be dependent on perspective or context. Yet on reflection science is a theory-laden, messy, human activity. Can science be objective in spite of (or perhaps because of) that messiness?