Dans cet article, on suggère qu’un rôle central peut être assigné à la philosophie de la chimie dans la philosophie des sciences post-kuhnienne en général, et dans l’analyse du débat opposant le réalisme scientifique à l’anti-réalisme dans la philosophie des sciences standard. La philosophie des sciences construit la science comme une pratique plus que comme un réseau d’assertions. On soutient que le réalisme pratique permet d’éviter les défauts à la fois du réalisme scientifique standard et de l’anti-réalisme. On analyse un (...) livre important publié récemment, B. Bensaude-Vincent’s & J. Simon’s Chemistry — The Impure Science [Bensaude-Vincent & Simon 2008], et on interprète la position des auteurs comme une sorte de réalisme pratique. (shrink)

Using the concept of purity to reflect on the relationship between chemical practice and the philosophy of science, this article considers the philosophical significance of the chemical manipulations that aim to purify or otherwise transform matter. Starting from a consideration of the nature and role of pure (or idealised) examples in philosophy of science, the article underlines the temptation towards abstraction and theory for both scientists and philosophers. The article goes on to argue that chemistry, despite its increasing theoretical sophistication, (...) is a science that remains particularly close to laboratory manipulations. This point is made in reference to the work of Gaston Bachelard on the production of purity and with the aid of historical examples, notably exploring the interplay between techniques of purification and the definition of elements, with special attention paid to Lavoisier’s definition of elements as the final limit of analysis. The closing section concerns the manufacture of steel from iron ore in the eighteenth century, illustrating this process using texts by Pierre-Joseph Macquer and Denis Diderot. Steel production is used to illustrate the kinds of philosophical question that are raised by paying attention to the details of chemical practice rather than jumping straight to chemical theory and also suggests how scientific theory can emerge from this practice itself. (shrink)

Measurement theory in (Hand in The world through quantification. Oxford University Press, 2004; Suppes and Zinnes in Basic measurement theory. Psychology Series, 1962) is concerned with the assignment of number to objects of phenomena. Representational aspect of measurement is the extent to which the assigned numbers and arithmetics truthfully represent the underlying objects and their relations, and is characteristic to natural sciences; pragmatic aspect is the extent to which the assigned numbers serve purposes other than representing the underlying phenomena, and (...) is characteristic to social sciences (Hand in The world through quantification. Oxford University Press, 2004). Here I criticise this distinction of representational and pragmatic measurements on the basis of the earlier history of the periodic system of chemical elements, viewed in terms of a practice based philosophy of science by Rein Vihalemm. I argue that the periodic system, although a natural scientific system interpretable as a measurement system, has considerable, in Hand’s terms pragmatic, aspects in it. Those aspects include: tampering with the material measurement results for the theoretical ideal of systematicity; adopting metaphysical assumptions that cannot be experimentally proven, like individuality of elements and atomicity; theoretical construction of the abstract entity—element—as the reference of the measurement system amenable to mathematically elegant ordering. Contrary to Suppes and Zinnes (Basic measurement theory. Psychology Series, 1962) I also argue for the dependence of the assigned numerical system on the material-procedural base of the measurement. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the relationship between historians, philosophers and sociologists of science, and indeed scientists themselves. I argue that they co-habit a shared intellectual territory ; and they should be able to do so peacefully, and with mutual respect, even if they disagree radically about how to describe the methods and results of science. I then go on to explore some of the challenges to mutually respectful cohabitation between history, philosophy and sociology of science. I conclude by identifying (...) a familiar kind of project in the philosophy of science which seeks to explore the worldview of a particular scientific discipline, and argue that it too has a right to explore the shared territory even though some historians and sociologists may find it methodologically suspect. (shrink)

Chemistry as the special science of the elements Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9458-4 Authors Klaus Ruthenberg, Faculty of Science, Coburg University of Applied Sciences, 96406 Coburg, Germany Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.