Philosophy reduction

It is worth noting that typically personnel and logistics represent 30% to 50% of operating costs while maintenance costs represent 20% to 40% of operating costs. These are particular areas in which cost control and reduction should be focused. This may mean reviewing the operations and maintenance philosophies discussed in Section 11.0, to check whether they are being applied, and whether they need to be updated. 

As to the general issue of reduction, chemists would do well to consider the work of philosophers of science, who have for some time renounced the notion that any particular branch of science may be strictly reduced to a more basic science. The classic work giving conditions for strict reduction is by Nagel (53), and several detailed criticisms of his views have been published (54, 55). More recently there appears to be a partial return to reductionism under the guise of supervenience . Chemistry is said to supervene over physics even though it cannot be shown to be strictly reducible in the sense of Nagel. Whether supervenience represents merely a hope and whether it holds any explanatory power is the focus of much current work in philosophy (56-58). 

Feyerabend, P. [1962] Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism , in H. Feigl and G. Maxwell (eds). Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis. 

Sklar, L. [1967] Types oflntertheoretical Reduction, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 18, p. 109. 

Eric Scerri studied chemistry at the Universities of London, Cambridge and Southampton, and obtained a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science from King s College, London on the question of "The Reduction of Chemistry to Quantum Mechanics," He has been a research felloiu in the history and philosophy of science at the London School of Economics and at the California Institute of Technology. He is currently an assistant professor of chemistry at Bradley University, where he also teaches histoiy and philosophy of chemistry, which are also his main research interests. He is editor of the new journal Foundations of Chemistry. Address Department of Chemistry, Bradley University, Peoria, IL 61625. Internet scerri bradley.edu. 

It is indeed a great honor to be invited to contribute to this memorial volume. I should say from the outset that I never met Lowdin but nevertheless feel rather familiar with at least part of his wide-ranging writing. In 1986 I undertook what I believe may have been the first PhD thesis in the new field of philosophy of chemistry. My topic was the question of the reduction of chemistry to quantum mechanics. Not surprisingly this interest very soon brought me to the work of Lowdin and in particular his analysis of rigorous error bounds in ab initio calculations (Lowdin, 1965). 

Secondly, the minimum amount of intermediate storage is determined with and without the PIS operational philosophy. In both cases the production goal was set to that which was achieved when the model was solved with infinite intermediate storage. In the illustrative example a 20% reduction in the amount of intermediate storage is achieved. The design model is an MINLP model due to the non-linear capital cost objective function. This model is applied to an illustrative problem and results in the flowsheet as well as determining the capacities of the required units. 

Dray, W. (1957), Law and Explanation in History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. Feyerabend, P. (1964), Reduction, Empiricism and Laws, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. Ill, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. 

Balzer, W. and Dawe, C. M. (1986), Structure and comparison of genetic theories (1) Classical genetics (2) The reduction of character-factor genetics to molecular genetics , The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 57, 55 -69, 177-191. 

Hull, D. L. (1972), Reduction in genetics - biology or philosophy , Philosophy of Science, 39,... 

Schaffner, K. F. (1977), Reduction, reductionism, values and progress in the biomedical sciences , in R. Colodny (Ed), (a volume in) The Pittsburgh Series in the Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 143-171. 

Schaffner, K. F. (1993), Theory, structure, reduction and disciplinary integration in biology , Biology and Philosophy, 8, 319-347. 

A wide range of operating conditions and design philosophies affect mercury cell efficiency. For example, the fundamental distinction between a resaturation and a waste brine process influences the temperature and brine strength profile along the length of the cell and hence the overall efficiency. Another important factor is the quality of the brine. Impurities in the brine can cause base-plate deposits, which tend to reduce the anode/cathode gap. This gradual reduction in gap requires either manual or automatic adjustment and, eventually, the cell must be taken off-line and the thick mercury removed. 

TTie classification of kinetic methods proposed by Pardue [18] is adopted in the software philosophy. TTie defined objective of measurement in the system is to obtain the best regression fit to a minimum of 10 data points, taken over either a fixed time (i.e. the maximum time for slow reactions) or variable time (for reactions complete in less than 34 min, which is the maximum practical observation time). In an analytical system generating information at the rate of SO datum points per second, with reactions being monitored for up to 2040 s, effective data-reduction is of prime importance. To reduce this large quantity of analytical data to more manageable proportions, an algorithm was devised to optimize the time-base of the measurements for each individual specimen. 

Much of the ethos of community drug treatment as it has developed has been firmly grounded in harm-reduction policies. There is frequent debate as to exactly what such principles entail, and even how appropriate they are in countries at different stages of development. Those interested in the philosophy are referred to a paper by AL Ball (2007) from the department of HIV/Aids at the World Health Organization, which clearly still sees avoidance of HIV as one of the key aims of this policy agenda. A short commentary on that article succinctly sums up the areas of importance in drug service provision, as follows ... 

Philosophy of Chemistry, Reduction, Emergence, and Chemical Education... 

In this article I hope to introduce chemical educators to some of the work carried out in the philosophy of chemistry. The relevance of such work and especially that carried out on the reduction of chemistry to physics is considerable, and especially so in the case of physical chemistry. As the very name of the discipline implies, physical chemistry juxtaposes aspects of chemistry with aspects of physics. The relationship between these two classical areas of science needs to be considered in order to ascertain the extent to which chemistry should be taught as applied physics or to inform the teaching of physical chemistry per se. 

Here is one immediately relevant point for chemical educators. These studies carried out in philosophy of chemistry remind us of the approximate nature of physical accounts of chemical phenomena and they document the reductive gap that remains to be bridged, something that quantum chemists and other practitioners are not generally too eager to discuss in publications. 

A more general approach adopted by many philosophers is called physicalism. This does not entail reduction of the theoretical or epistemological kind but is a question of whether the physical determines the chemical. Physicalism has been invoked in philosophy of mind to argue that there is a dependence relationship between mental events and physical goings on in the brain. This is clearly a weaker form of reductive claim that epistemological reduction discussed earlier in this article. 

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