Positivism order

There were, of course, middle positions between ontological realism and extreme conventionalism or positivism. Berzelius devised the alphanumeric system which, in slightly modified form, chemists still use today in order to designate the presumed atomistic compositions of molecular formulas rather than to make any detailed statement about the nature of the atoms themselves. Each of Berzelius s letters, such as the three entities in his preferred water formula, H2O, might reasonably be taken to refer to a quantity of matter, the real micro-characteristics of which were deliberately elided. A Berzelian chemical (as opposed to physical) atom, by this more cautious interpretation, was simply a packet of elemental matter of a certain relative weight, a packet that... 

The atom that was the subject for debate among chemists in the nineteenth century was not the atom of twentieth-century physics whether they admitted it or not, all of these chemists had a corpuscular vision of matter. Dalton s atom was intended to account for the discontinuity in combining proportions observed in chemical reactions, and not to provide a theory of the structure of matter. Thus, we need to consider the atomism of the chemists with respect to their own project rather than in terms of the physicists atom. If we adopt this approach, we see that there is no need to invoke the influence of Comte and his positivism in order to understand that their interpretation of the laws of chemical combination... 

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