Naive realist

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... 

One result was that a century later, the philosopher John Bradley could comfortably claim that most nineteenth-century chemists were naive realists ... 

Some of the founding documents of modern chemistry do explicitly address questions of epistemology. Where they are not explicit, we can reconstruct epistemological views by looking carefully at lectures, textbooks, and journal articles from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What we find is a plurality of methodologies in the practice of chemistry that belies simplistic stereotypes of a single chemical epistemology. Nineteenth-century chemists were not dyed-in-the-wool instrumentalists or radical skeptics, any more than they were naive empiricists or naive realists. And chemists have not all shared the same views about the aims and methods of their discipline. 

The lack of dynamic models and rigorous mathematics makes nineteenth-century chemistry a different science from physics, but it is no less methodologically sophisticated. Chemists employed varieties of signs, metaphors, and conventions with self-conscious examination and debates among themselves. Nineteenth-century chemists were neither militant empiricists nor naive realists. These chemists were relatively unified in their focus on problems and methods that provided a common core for the chemical discipline, and the language and imagery they used strongly demarcated mid-nineteenth-century chemistry from the field of mid-nineteenth-century physics and natural philosophy. 

As the evening wore on, our conversation drifted toward and around the possibility of violating normal physics, discussing it in terms of a psychological versus a naive/realist view of shamanic phenomena. We were especially interested in the obsidian liquids that ayahuasqueros are said to produce on the surface of their skins and use... 

Of course, nobody likes to be referred to as a naive anything, and not surprisingly, some chemists are quick to react if it is suggested that they tend to adopt a naively realistic attitude in their work." Nevertheless, I think it is true that chemists are often realists, naive or otherwise, and this may not be such a bad thing, as I will try to explain. The question hinges on the extent to which such realistic views are maintained and in what context they may or may not be appropriate. 

Paneth is clearly not a naive realist because he recognizes two senses of the term element. Indeed, he is the last chemist of any note to have stressed the value in drawing this distinction.In fact, Paneth s element scheme is the one still in use to this day, although most contemporary chemists would probably be loath to recognize a metaphysical or transcendental aspect to the nature of the elements, falsely believing that this might smack of alchemy, which they, of course, take to be a gravely mistaken enterprise. ... 

Mendeleev, the creator of the periodic system of the elements, drew the philosophical distinction between basic substances (abstract elements) and simple substances. Therefore, he cannot be accused of having acted as a naive realist. However, having arrived at the periodic classification by giving emphasis to abstract elements, he resisted the prevalent reductionist tendency of supposing the existence of a primary matter. He considered the elements as distinct individuals and adopted an intermediate position between realism and reduction. 

Paneth later followed Mendeleev in insisting on the distinction between basic substances and simple substances. While praising the chemist s use of naively realistic notions in most instances, Paneth pointed out that, to understand how the elements persist in the compounds, chemists must assume a more philosophical position. When faced with the question of isotopy, Paneth maintained the distinction between basic substances and simple substances but did not follow the reductive path of the physicist who would have been inclined to regard isotopes as different elements. Thus Paneth adopted an analogous intermediate position to that of Mendeleev. 

As is well known, van t Hoff played a central role in convincing chemists that the three-dimensional structure of molecules could be both apprehended and accurately represented, and it would be easy to categorize him as a naive realist with respect to... 

In 1997,1 met Bernadette Bensaude, the well-known French philosopher of science, whose work is motivated by the history of chemistry. We struck up a conversation about Paneth and his view of the elements which is the subject of one of the classic papers in philosophy of chemistry written in German and translated by his son Heinz Post (Paneth 1962)7. The gist of Paneth s paper is that the chemist must adopt an intermediate position between the fully reductive view afforded by quantum mechanics and a naively realistic view that dwells on colors, smells, and such-like properties of macroscopic chemistry. In that paper, Paneth is concerned with how elements are to be regarded and he upholds a dual view of elements as unobservable basic substances on one hand and observable simple substances on the other. This he claims resolves a major puzzle in the philosophical understanding of substance, namely how it is that an element can survive in its compounds although the properties of the compound appear to bear very little resemblance to those of the element. 

Campbell is a Naive Realist in the sense set forth by A. D. Smith (2002, pp. 43-4) in The Problem of Perception. Naive Realists and sense-datum theorists are two species of act-object theorists, both locating the character of experience entirely in the object of it, but one taking the object to be a public physical object and the other taking it to be a mental (or at least not straightforwardly physical) object. See also Smith s note 67 on p. 281. 

Boyle s statement that nitre consists of volatile nitric acid and a solid residue shows just that oscillation [Schwanken] between the naive-realistic and the transcendental meanings of the terms which we exhibited above as particularly characteristic of the concept of element. (Paneth 2003, 136, emphasis original)... 

Let us return at last to the definition of chemical element, as established by lUPAC. I consider the most intriguing part of Paneth s formulation of this concept of element to be the necessity of schwanken, the oscillation between the abstract transcendental and the concrete naive realist view. In an earlier section of this chapter we noted that this definition suspends the concept of element in a space of speculation between the two poles in much the same way that metaphor suspends judgment between intersecting sets of alternative meanings. Where definitions are intended to attenuate the inherent polysemy of language, metaphor activates multiple sets. The unique feature of the lUPAC definition, seen below, is that it wants it both ways the distinction is spelled out in the second definition but withdrawn by the end ... 

Our hypothesis is that students with inereased metaconeeptual awareness can overcome their miseoneeptions about the miero world. In another research project, it was found that metaconception is accompanied by a comprehensive, precise, and coherent knowledge (Fischler Peuckert, 1999). In other words the transfer of macroscopic properties to particles is done almost exclusively by those students who have a naive-realistic conception about particles. 

After the project week, the desired positive effects became evident in all areas of the particle conception and were highly significant The learning effects with regard to the thinking about models suggested that students advanced from a naive-realistic conception to a hypothetical-realistic position. Moreover, flie results of the analysis of scales elucidated that students were more careful not to apply macroscopic characteristics directly to the smallest particles. The same pertained to ascribing macroscopic behaviour. 

Moreover, a reduction of chemistry, or more specifically the periodic table, to quantum mechanics requires far more than a mere approximate explanation of the properties of elements in terms of outer electron configurations. After all, quantum mechanics or atomic theory , which the authors constantly allude to, is not a qualitative theory dealing in outer-shell electrons. Such explanations are indeed frowned upon by physicists as being of a typically picturesque and naively realistic kind, typical of chemists. Worse still, according to quantum mechanics, the very notion of electron shells or electron configurations becomes strictly invalid as mentioned in the introduction. ... 

According to Bachelard the notion of (chemical) substance operates effectively as a category In daily life and pre-modern chemistry substances are treated in a naive realistic sense. The chemist still does this when she says the density of gold is 19.5. This stage is followed by rational interpretation. The description of substances by synthesis is the foundation of chemical rationalism. In modern organic chemistry substances only get to be truly defined at the moment of their construction. Similarly in the early history of the discovery of the chemical elements, one cannot fail to be struck by the success of realism . But when Mendeleev proposed his system for the organization of elementary substances, the order of substances imposes itself as a rationality. In the third stage, which he labels... 

At first glance, chemistry seems to deal much more with real things than does physics. Accordingly, most chemists and several philosophers of chemistry tend to take a more or less realist point of view of science. While chemists are usually naive realists, and talk about what some philosophers consider theoretical entities (like atoms, electrons, and even orbitals) as if these had the same epistemological status as apples, spoons, and snooker balls, some philosophers of chemistry have developed a more sophisticated entity realist position (like the dualistic, transcendental realism), or that of a microstructuralist approach. ... 

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