Despite the currently perceived urgent need among contemporary philosophers of chemistry for adjudicating between two rival metaphysical conceptual frameworks—is chemistry primarily a science of substances or processes?—this essay argues that neither provides us with what we need in our attempts to explain and comprehend chemical operations and phenomena. First, I show the concept of a chemical property can survive the abandoning of the metaphysical framework of substance. While this abandonment means that we will need to give up essential properties, contingent (...) properties can give us all the stability we need to account for chemical continuity as well as change. I then go on to show that this attention to clusters of contingent properties does not force us into the arms of an alternative process metaphysical framework either. Finally, I sketch a view I call particularism with respect to chemical properties on analogy with moral particularism. I conclude by sketching some of the implications for the field of philosophy of chemistry of my proposal that we abandon our interest in the metaphysical question of what chemistry is primarily about in favor of a broadly scientific particularism with respect to kinds and properties. (shrink)

Students in interdisciplinary science educations are faced with the challenge of combining knowledge and standards from different disciplines. To help them overcome this challenge it would be helpful to reflect more explicitly on what differences in epistemic aims there may be between the different disciplines. To aid further studies that will strengthen such discussions this paper outlines an empirical method that can be used to expose possible qualitative differences in explanations from different disciplines. The method is based on the use (...) of science textbooks as sources of explanations. I will argue that it is important to be very clear about how explanations are identified in the sources if the aim of the study is to make a strong empirical claim about the nature of explanations. Following a discussion of similar studies I will present an alternative procedure for identifying explanations in written sources that suits the purposes of this study better. A pilot study is then presented to illustrate the method and its limitations. (shrink)

The most common way of studying explanations in philosophy of science and science education is through case studies. Recently these have been supplemented with studies based on empirical methods. This chapter provides an empirical method for collecting and comparing exemplar explanations across scientific disciplines with the aim of exposing possible qualitative differences between them. The method is based on the use of science textbooks as sources of explanations. I discuss a number of possible strategies for identifying explanations in these sources, (...) and specify a set of reliable linguistic indicators that can be used for this purpose. A pilot study is presented to illustrate the method and its limitations. (shrink)