This paper evaluates a general argument for the conclusion that visual representations in science must play the role of truth bearers if they are to figure as legitimate contributors to scientific arguments and explanations. The argument is found to be unsound. An alternative approach to assessing the role of visual representations in science is exemplified by an examination of the role of structural formulas in organic chemistry. Structural formulas are found not to play the role of truth bearers; nonetheless, they (...) contribute to the arguments and explanations of organic chemistry. An early success of conformational analysis is presented in order to illustrate the role of structural formulas in the discourse of organic chemistry. *Received January 2007; revised July 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Rowan University, 201 Mullica Hill Road, Glassboro, NJ 08028; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Organic chemists have been able to develop a robust, theoretical understanding of the phenomena they study; however, the primary theoretical devices employed in this field are not mathematical equations or laws, as is the case in most other physical sciences. Instead it is diagrams, and in particular structural formulas and potential energy diagrams, that carry the explanatory weight in the discipline. To understand how this is so, it is necessary to investigate both the nature of the diagrams employed in organic (...) chemistry and how these diagrams are used in the explanations of the discipline. I will begin this paper by characterizing some of the major ways that structural formulas used in organic chemistry. Next I will present a model of the explanations in organic chemistry and describe how both structural formulas and potential energy diagrams contribute to these explanations. This will be followed by several examples that support my abstract account of the role of diagrams in the explanations of organic chemistry. In particular, I will consider both the appeal to ‘hyperconjugation’ in the explanation of alkene stability and how the idea of ‘ring strain’ was developed to explain the relative stability of cyclic compounds. (shrink)

The language, customs, and manners of scientists are frequently unintelligible to the rest of the population, and there is considerable danger that the ideas and forces that are moving mountains will be increasingly inaccessible tothose outside the laboratories. The peril of such a situation to a democracy, where understanding must be assumed to be fairly general, is probably as great in the realm of ideas as the physical danger of the instruments of destruction. Dr. Conant sets out to show how (...) the gulf can be bridged. Instead of a series of assertions about science being ordered knowledge, or the classification of facts, he presents a historical view of a number of the great scientists, of what their generation knew of their subjects, of the problem they set out to examine, and of how they solved it. The reader is enabled to follow the scientific method at work, with all its limitations and wonders. (shrink)