Chemical objects as iterated Kantian objects

In a previous post, I referred to iterated Kantian objects, without really explaining what they were. I can remedy that now. The iterated Kantian object is the end result of my thinking on what theoretical terms and objects featuring in chemical theories really amount to, and hence it is my proposal for how I think the ontology of chemistry might just function.

The idea starts with the discussion that we've had recently, in book length form, on Kant's transcendental idealism. For non-philosophers, transcendental idealism is really how to conceive of the relation between the 'thing in itself' and the 'thing as it appears to us', or, in Kant's terms, the noumena and the phenomena. For Kant, we don't have access to the thing in itself, and our access to the thing as we perceive it is epistemically mediated by what our mind brings to the table in our perception. Here's the discussion point: The 'thing in itself' is only minimally accessible, if at all. I know, I do gross injustice to Kant here, on several levels.

This is where the trouble starts. For one might argue that if the thing in itself is not accessible, then by the same token we don't know that it exists. In Henry Allison's 'Transcendental Idealism' he argues that the 'thing in itself' and the thing as we perceive it' really refer to two modes in which we may reflect on concepts and objects. The 'thing in itself' is what there is beyond the appearances, so to say. In Rae Langton's 'Kantian Humility' she argues that the 'thing in itself' and the 'thing as we perceive it' really refers to two non-overlapping sets of properties of an object -- the intrinsic properties which are inaccessible to us, and the relational properties, which we perceive through our process of receptivity to the thing observed.

All this degenerates pretty quickly into a debate on what Kant might have meant exactly when he made the distinction. This discussion is of historical interest, but as a philosopher of chemistry, with a nasty ontological problem to solve, I propose that we read Kant here in the sense in which Derek Parfit proposes we read him in his 'On What Mattters' -- roughly as a philosopher with a large amount of creative ideas, but also one that sometimes lacks in coherence.

Specifically, I propose that we read the 'thing in itself' as an interesting scientific challenge, and read Kant as a philosopher inviting us to do some probing, even while he maintains that we're trying to peel an onion with an infinite amount of layers. As a scientist, I'm happy with that. I am still somewhat uncertain of how much exactly of Nineteenth-Century science may be read as a debate between scientists probing for this 'thing in itself' and neo-Kantian's admonitions that such probing was somehow inadmissible. I think the development of atomic theory and the tetrahedral carbon atom pose some interesting examples, but for now I digress.

That approach can, I think, make sense of some puzzling issues in current philosophy of chemistry. For the ontological issue plaguing philosophy of chemistry is that in a sense we have two cooperating -- or some might say, competing -- theories of matter: chemistry and physics.

From the viewpoint of Kantian objects, and taking Kant as a creative, but perhaps not entirely coherent philosopher, we can then develop the view that chemistry and physics form two different sets of epistemic conditions placed on matter, and hence develop a different set of pointers to the 'thing in itself'.

The suggestion is that chemistry, as a theory of 'transformation' and 'stuff', does not probe as deeply into matter as physics, which is trying to delve deeper into a foundational theory. These are gross oversimplifications, but will have to do for now. What this suggests is that what's lacking in the Kantian object is a notion of depth, or, more precisely, an account of how things in themselves may sometimes break through their shells of epistemic conditioning if we ask the same question in a different way and then compare notes.

To develop the notion of depth, it is useful to get to some concepts from object oriented programming. In object oriented programming a large complex program is split up into 'objects', say, transactions in a banking system, or personal records, which perform certain functions. The object 'person' in the computer program may 'expose' certain methods, such as 'age', 'address', 'sex', 'income' (if the program in question is run by the IRD) and so on. Other parts of the program can 'consume' these methods, but do not have to know how they are implemented, the 'method' itself is 'encapsulated'. The internal definition is hidden from view, but the results are accessible to the component that wants to use the method.

This is what the idea that I'm developing on chemical objects amounts to: both chemistry and physics populate their relevant concepts -- say, atom -- with encapsulated methods. Physicists developed 'orbitals', 'nucleus', 'electron' etc., chemists developed the concept of 'valency', 'directed bonding', and so on. From inside the science itself this makes sense, but ultimately, these concepts get 'imported' to somewhere else in encapsulated state, and relevant context is lost in the process. By the way, at the epistemic level, I think that Brown and Priest's 'Chunk and Permeate' approach is one example of what I mean here.

The concept of 'iteration' really means that this importing and exporting over time serves to refine the concepts, and develop further relevant contexts to this process. That is, at some point the process iterates out to a more or less coherent view of nature. A large part of the ontological problems currently existing in the philosophy of chemistry are because this process is not finished, though a significant amount of ontological debate also ensues (orbitals, I'm looking at you here) because the philosophers involved have no clue of what they're dealing with. I've read more silliness about the ontology of orbitals in the last year than I care to mention.

So, in a nutshell, this approach depends on a number of things:

• A reading of Kantian 'things in themselves' and 'things as they appear' that's more like Allison's than Langton's
• The idea that some of Nineteenth-Century science may be read as an attempt to probe the inaccessible 'thing in itself'
• The idea that chemistry and physics place different epistemic conditions upon how we perceive objects
• The idea that 'deeper' concepts are encapsulated in the ontology of the object.
• The idea that progress is made through a process of iterating the imports / exports.
  

By the way, programming has a few more terms that are of interest to this sort of philosophy of science. To get a sense of how suggestive some of them are, consider 'refactoring' and 'reverse engineering' (the last is not from object oriented programming, but is a key hacking / security technogy).