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).

Speculative Realism and the Chemical Object

A few weeks ago I became interested in the subject of speculative realism and what the speculative realists might have to contribute to the philosophy of chemistry. At first sight, it seems not too much: speculative realists take the latest French philosophical fashions as their model, and some of the self-important pompous braying-ass ness that are all too often found in French philosophical thought seem to be much in evidence here (the writing style is dominated by superlatives, but I think I can make up my own mind here).

Then on second thought, speculative realism seems involved in travelling from the work of Latour more or less back to earth. If one's starting point is intertwined with the world-weary

'turns' of Bruno Latour, I somehow think it will take a while before one lands back on earth, but it's a journey well worth following, if even from a distance.

Philosophy of chemistry tends to sit more in the analytic tradition, but it has a couple of problems inside this analytic tradition where some thoughts from speculative realism might just help.

For instance, philosophy of chemistry has a large ontological problem, which has been keeping me busy for a few years now. I think I'm close to a solution, and no, it's not a solution that even remotely resembles speculative realism (it has more to do with the notion of encapsulation of properties inside an iterated Kantian object, but maybe more about that in a later post). But there is something intuitively attractive for a philosopher of chemistry about a philosophical position that has the following to say about reality, for instance by Graham Harman in The Speculative Turn [1]:

Radical philosophy is never weird enough, never sufficiently attentive to the basic ambiguity built into substance from Aristotle onward. Radical philosophies are all reductionist in character. Whether they reduce upward to human access or downward to more fundamental layers, all say that a full half of reality is nothing more than an illusion generated by the other half. Objects by contrast are the site of polarization, ambiguity, or weirdness. (p.24)

There is a strange connection here with what I've always found attractive in chemistry over physics: the green lab coats that some people in our lab had, coloured with self-made pigments of course, the dabbling with stuff like thermite in front of a classroom full of astounded kids, the strong coffee, the home brew and distillation (the latter not strictly speaking legal), the fact that, as my own university told me on their careers day, with a chemistry degree one could do everything: they had a graduate who'd started a bicycle repair shop, one that started a mini brewery, and oh, some went into research. All were life-long learners. If speculative realism is somewhere capable of capturing that, there is a lot of French philosophy I'd be prepared to put up with.

[1] Graham Harman, On the Undermining of Objects: Grant, Bruno, and Radical Philosophy, in Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism re.Press, Melbourne, 2011)

On some future directions in the philosophy of chemistry

My academic interests are primarily in the philosophy of chemistry. Since I'm fairly familiar with the literature in this field, and have a few academic hobby-horses running around here too, it's maybe a good idea to sum up some of the currently unsolved problems that I think philosophy of chemistry will run into. Of course, this list is biased and not entirely without any personal interest -- I hope to make some contributions in these areas in the future too.

With that out of the way, here's what I think some of the larger looming problems and directions are

1. The relationship of philosophy of chemistry to the wider philosophy of science. Mohan Matthen has an insightful post on the (lack of) direction of philosophy of science here, which I think is somewhere close to the mark as to the general demise of philosophy of science. I only have one additional comment to make to that post: working in the general philosophy of science increasingly requires in-depth knowledge of one of the sciences, as opposed to more general knowledge. I can see the philosophy of chemistry contributing to some of the wider questions in the philosophy of science on the basis of more realistic theories of chemistry, such as (for example) Eyring's theory of absolute reaction rates, Fukui's theory of frontier orbitals, and Prigogine's ideas on non-linear reactions as mature theories of chemistry that can add new insights to the philosophy of science.
2. The relationship of quantum chemistry to quantum theory. The foundations of quantum theory is a much discussed topic, which I won't go into here. But the basic problem posed in Primas' 'Chemistry, Quantum mechanics and reductionism', which came out in 1981 and again in 1984, is still in my opinion unsolved. Primas argues that quantum mechanics, due to its interpretational problems, is not a good theory to reduce to. Philosophers of chemistry have not really examined how newly proposed interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as in terns of einselection or decoherence have a bearing on this problem. I see the theory of decoherence as a real contender in this area.
3. Chemical ontologies. We have had a lot of discussion about the use of the causal theory of reference in the construction of chemical ontologies, but it seems to me that there is still a large amount of open questions on how to connect chemical theories to ontological theories, such as truthmaking or Quinean quantification. In the wake of this, we might just be able to put paid to the idea of 'ontological reduction' which in my opinion is a particularly unlucky invention that has plagued the philosophy of chemistry for about a decade.
4. Theory formation and theoretical terms in chemistry. There is a paper by Roald Hoffmann in Synthese arguing that chemists do not engage in theory formation in the sense in which it could be argued that physicists do. The question of course is what it is then that chemists' engage in. Hoffmann has his set of answers, but these still have, in my opinion, to be tested against a wider range of examples from chemistry to be useful.
5. Anything having a bearing on inter-theory relations and unity of science with theories of chemistry on one end and biology / physics on the other.
6. Bonding, density, orbitals and observables. This is starting to some degree based on the theories of Richard Bader, but I don't think that the real surprising conclusions of Bader's theory are as of yet fully appreciated - that they allow the calculation of properties on a 'per atom' or even 'per functional group' level. Also this comes back to some of the problems mentioned above below 2.