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Elements, Compounds, and Other Chemical Kinds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Robin Findlay Hendry
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Abstract

In this article I assess the problems and prospects of a microstructural approach to chemical substances. Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam famously claimed that to be gold is to have atomic number 79 and to be water is to be H2O. I relate the first claim to the concept of element in the history of chemistry, arguing that the reference of element names is determined by atomic number. Compounds are more difficult: water is so complex and heterogeneous at the molecular level that `water is H2O’ seems false under some interpretations. I sketch a response to this problem.

Type
Chemical Substances
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 73 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2004 Biennial Meeting of The Philosophy of Science Association. Part II: Symposia Papers. Edited by Miriam Solomon , December 2006 , pp. 864 - 875
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I would like to thank Joseph LaPorte and Paul Needham for their comments on previous versions of this article, and Valentin Ostrovsky for the nuclear reaction example in Section 3. I am also grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for leave during which I researched the article and the British Academy for funding my travel to the PSA meeting.

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