Realism naive

Nor, while flirting with the Scylla of naive empiricism, have practitioners of chemistry escaped the Charybdis of naive realism. Dalton s atomism was in fact unrelentingly and naively realist. His illustrative plates in the New System of Chemistry (1808) are claimed there to exhibit "the mode of combination of some of the more simple cases" of ultimate particles forming bigger ones. At midcentury, Williamson, Dalton s compatriot, received some notoriety for his defense of realism, albeit a more sophisticated variety, particularly in a London Chemical Society debate in 1869.6... 

As we will see, this exaggerated view of naive realism in chemical philosophy does not stand up to historical scrutiny. 9... 

Compare this with what Putnam writes in a similar context Here the philosopher is ignoring his own epistemological position. He is philosophizing as if naive realism were true of him (or, equivalently, as if he and he alone were in an absolute relation to the world). ( Introductions xi)... 

I will draw liberally on the work of my thesis grandfather, the chemist, Fritz Paneth. I use the term somewhat unusually, because Paneth was not the person who advised my own advisor Heinz Post but was, in fact, his natural father, from whom Heinz presumably developed an interest in the philosophical aspects of science. I will touch on such areas as realism, including naive realism, the nature of the periodic system, metaphysical aspects of chemistry, and, as suggested by the editors, the reduction of chemistry. 

Let me now turn to what Paneth, an inorganic chemist and one of the founders of radiochemistry, had to say about naive realism in chemistry ... 

And yet Paneth goes to great pains to point out that naive realism is not always the appropriate attitude to adopt in chemistry ... 

With the concept of simple substance we may remain within the realm of naive realism. When we are concerned with the basic substance, however, we cannot disregard its connection with the transcendental world without getting involved in contradictions. (Paneth, 1965, p. 66)... 

Paneth s contribution was thus to uphold the autonomy of chemistry and to resist following the reductive path of the physicist, which would have destroyed the periodic system and would eventually have turned chemistry into elementary particle physics. In fact, Paneth was recommending a form of naive realism whereby isotopes of the same element could be regarded as being identical in chemistry, even though we know that they are not strictly identical from the more reductive perspective of physics. 

In philosophy, the term naive realism is generally taken to mean a belief in macroscopic objects for what they appear to be and independently of any views on what lies below the surface. I will be using the term in this sense but will also use it to mean the adoption of superficial views about microscopic entities when discussing atomic orbitals and configurations. 

As opposed to metaphysics, metachemistry does not attempt to decide between naive realism and the various shades of rationalism instead, it produces dispersion analyses of notions like substance or mass, fire or air, at various stages on their route toward the realization of the real. It is this route and the development of propositions over time that finally needs to be elucidated. 

But the idea of photons does not dispense with the need for the wave theory of light, which is categorically demanded by the phenomenon of interference. Therefore, a great abnegation of naive realism... 

If the particle is an electron, then ipif/ is proportional to the average electric density at x, y, z. if/if/, being independent of time, can be represented in space as a continuous cloud of electrification varying from point to point in a manner shown by the solution of the wave equation which has yielded if/. Although this cloud is fictitious and corresponds to a probability or to a time-average, it is very convenient to visualize its spatial symmetry, and even to look upon the electrical distribution as a real one. This in one sense illustrates the reluctance with which naive realism is forsaken. 

The difficulty I have just raised for Naive Realism should be distinguished from another that is more commonly acknowledged and... 

One philosophical view of sense perception is that we directly perceive the physical world as it is. We see colours, for example, because the world is coloured. This Is termed naive realism and is not in agreement with biological and philosophical thinking. 

Another way of regarding the same question is to consider typical chemical explanations , full of visualizations and sometimes naive realism, and contrast them with the more abstract mathematical explanations favored by the physicist. 

It is worth noting that in the case of this isotope controversy, Paneth s recommendation for the retention of the chemist s periodic table depended on the notion of elements as basic substances and not as simple substances. If chemists had focused on simple substances, they would have been forced to recognize the new elements in the form of isotopes that were being discovered in rapid succession. By choosing to ignore these elements in favor of the elements as basic substances, chemists could continue to uphold that the fundamental units of chemistry, or its natural kinds, remained as those entities that occupied a single place in the periodic system. This represents a parallel case to that of the persistence of the elements in compounds, a situation in which chemists must likewise abandon naive realism in favor of what Paneth called the metaphysical view of elements in order to rationalize the situation."... 

This sense of naive realism is sometimes explained in terms of Eddington s table . As Eddington wrote, if we remain at the macroscopic level, a wooden table appears to be solid and impenetrable. But if we consider the view from the perspective of a reductive physics, we learn that the atoms that make up the table are mostly empty space, a view that appears difficult to reconcile with the solidity of the table. 

Prom facts to effects, the scientific spirit moves from the naive realism of the prescientific age (objects pre-existing our knowledge of them), to the age of rationalism, when the object is constructed by our knowledge. In Bachelard s terminology rationalism refers to a constructionist model as opposed to Baconianism and characterizes the new scientific spirit . Over the years, imder the inspiration of chemistry, Bachelard gradually shifted from an idealist version of rationalism to a rational materialism. ... 

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