Chemical realism and the two faces of Janus
Keywords:
realismo químico, filosofia da química, Ian Hacking, filosofia experimental, affordanceAbstract
The image of Janus, the Roman God of change and transformation, serves as a beautiful allegory of history and the philosophical, social, economic and environmental implications of chemical knowledge of materials. On the other hand, as the God of transitions, he can be seen as a symbol of creation, temporality, generation and composition. And if there is one thing that is the hard core of chemistry, it is the countless substances created and transformed by chemists every day. From an epistemic point of view, chemical knowledge has its own distinctive and unique mark: it lies between the realms of the theoretical and the practical, the abstract and the concrete. This is why Janus can ultimately mean the representational but also interventionist sphere of chemical science.
Within this context, a clear question arises: do the entities postulated by chemists at different times really exist? In the contemporary debate on the philosophy of chemistry, the emphasis of the question changes, because it is important to understand whether or not these chemical entities intervene in the phenomena studied. This is why, when proposing to reflect on the unobservable entities, that all chemists mobilize in their laboratories, in addition to the representative, theoretical, abstract side of this knowledge, we must emphasize its interventionist, practical and therefore operative and laboratory scope. We will argue here that it is possible to identify what we will call a practical and operative "chemical realism" throughout the history of chemistry.
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