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Explanation, Unification, and What Chemistry Gets from Causation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Janet D. Stemwedel
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Abstract

I consider a way the concept of causation could be excised from chemical practice, suggested by Kitcher's view that causes are just a subset of unifying patterns which play a particular psychological role for us. Kitcherian chemistry is at first blush well equipped to handle explanatory tasks. However, it would force chemists to accept certain unifying patterns as explanatory, which they do not think are at all explanatory. This might head off some descriptive lines of enquiry and damage prospects for the identification of potentially larger-scale explanations. More important than this, to chemists, it could put them off from finding the explanatory patterns that are true—true because they get at the real structure of the chemical phenomena in the world.

Type
Causation and Explanation in Chemistry
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 71 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2002 Biennial Meeting of The Philosophy of Science Association. Part II: Symposia Papers , December 2004 , pp. 1060 - 1070
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I am grateful to Peter Godfrey-Smith, Michael Strevens, and Michael Weisberg for helpful discussions and valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.

References

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