The decades of the 1920s to the 1960s were a period of transformation in chemical science. The era was marked by erosion of boundaries that had often been drawn between chemistry and other scientific disciplines. In particular, theories, instruments, and mathematical approaches associated with the new physics of X-rays, the electron particle, and the electron wave enabled chemists and other physical scientists to address unsolved chemical problems of structure and mechanism and to ask new questions that further expanded and transcended (...) disciplinary borders. In turn, the historiography of these developments reflects the pluralism of chemistry in historical narratives written by scientists, historians, philosophers, and sociologists. (shrink)

Using the notorious bridge law “water is H 2 O” and the relation between molecular structure and quantum mechanics as examples, I argue that it doesn’t make sense to aim for specific definition(s) of intertheoretical or interdiscourse relation(s) between chemistry and physics (reduction, supervenience, what have you). Proposed definitions of interdiscourse and part-whole relations are interesting only if they provide insight in the variegated interconnected patchwork of theories and beliefs. There is “automatically” some sort of interdiscourse relation if different discourses (...) claim to have something to say about the same situation (event, system), which is the basis of (contingent) local supervenience relations, which, proper empirically support being provided, can be upgraded to ceteris paribus bridge laws. Because of the ceteris paribus feature, and the discourse dependence of event identification, there is at best only global supervenience of the “special sciences” on the physical (and of parts of physics on other parts of physics). (shrink)