Focusing on Some Real-world Issues

The purpose of these articles is to focus on specific issues that have come to the attention of the author over his many years in the industry, working across several continents. That is why they are written in a very personal style. But the content is hopefully not missing 

---

In a sense, the chemists also avoided the physical issue of whether elements were necessary in a mechanistic universe by focusing on the functional aspects of the material world. Simply by establishing that elements had unique characteristics, they could differentiate matter. Elements could be identified, classified, isolated, and used in experiments. If Descartes, Boyle, and Newton pictured matter as some form of prime particles differentiated only by proportion, mass, or size, it did not really matter to chemists. So long as the resulting products had unique and unchanging properties, the designation element was both practical and scientifically justified. While what made an element unique would continue to be a profound scientific question, by the beginning of the nineteenth century chemists were convinced that elements were real and that they served as a sound basis for scientific research. 

Since what I am proposing is that there is a vast field of unexplored research for philosophers of science to continue to pursue, 1 hope you will not expect me to provide any kind of detailed map of this terra incognita here. What I can hope to do, however, is just take up a few examples of the sort of inquiry I am proposing as it appears in a couple of the domains of inquiry noted previously. I will focus on a few examples from how science, internally, deals with its real problems of domain limitation (or lack of limitation) and how science, internally, deals with some specific issues of idealization and its consequences for understanding the place of a theory in our scheme for describing the world. 1 won t try to deal here in any detail with issues in the realm of internal science and transience or with the deep problems of how science deals internally with multiple interpretations. 

---