Realist naive realism

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... 

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. 

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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