Historical ontology

Models are broadly distinguished on the one hand into material or physical or concrete, and on the other hand into abstract or conceptual or symbolic. Symbolic models include mathematical formulas and equations. Gilbert et al. (42) classified models according to their ontological status as follows mental, expressed, consensus, scientific, historical, and hybrid. Consensus, scientific, and historical models specifically developed for education are distinguished into teaching, curricular, and models of pedagogy. 

In this paper we discuss a number of issues which manifest the theoretical particularity of quantum chemistry and which are usually not discussed in an explicit manner either in the historical or in the philosophical studies related to quantum chemistry. We shall focus on five issues the re-thinking of the problem of reductionism, the discourse of quantum chemistry as a confluence of the traditions of physics, chemistry, and mathematics, the role of textbooks in consolidating this discourse, the ontological status of resonance, and the more general problem of the status of the chemical bond. Finally, we shall briefly discuss the impact of large scale computing. 

Textbooks in general are - necessarily - a-historical and only in a very few instances do we find a mention and, in even fewer cases, a discussion of some of the disputes in a discipline s early history. Interestingly, the early textbooks of quantum chemistry could also be read as polemic or partisan texts by proposing and arguing in favor of particular (ontological) hypotheses and approximation methods, each one of them adopts a particular viewpoint on how to answer the question of whether quantum chemistry is an application or use of quantum mechanics for chemical problems. 

Ursula Klein is senior research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She is author of Experiments, Models, Paper Tools Cultures of Organic Chemistry in the Nineteenth-Century (Stanford Stanford University Press, 2003), and (together with Wolfgang Lefevre) of Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science A Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA MIT Press, 2007), as well as editor of Tools and Modes of Representation in the Laboratory Sciences (Dordrecht Kluwer, 2001). 

See U. Klein and W. Lefevre, Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science A Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA MIT Press, 2007). 

But this does not make chemistry a simpler or more unrealistic discipline than physics. On the contrary, as it turns out the more realistic a scientific discipline is the more complex it is. It is a fallacy of misplaced concreteness, as Whitehead (1929) put it, to think that the first things are elementary particles. They may be or may be not, in an ontological sense. Historically and epistemologically, they are not. 

And yet, the foreclosure of blackness from the prospects and preoccupations of the modern world, the constitutive exclusion of blacks from the realm of humanity, hierarchies and all, can certainly be thought in ontological terms. Perhaps its structural manifestations should at least be considered quasi-ontological. This nomination would have to do with both the breathtaking historical longevity of antiblackness— whether one dates... 

They see such advances as being dependent upon the presence of reference to sound historical sources and, insightfully, upon the warrant of a coherent triad of underlying rationales an epistemological rationale, an ontological rationale, and a content rationale. 

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