In the Classroom edited by
Interdisciplinary Connections
Mark Alber Friends Academy Duck Pond Road Locust Valley, NY 11560
Report on an Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Philosophy of Chemistry Steven Gimbel Department of Philosophy, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA 17325;
[email protected] Michael Wedlock Department of Chemistry, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA 17325
Eric Scerri concludes his seminal article “Philosophy of Chemistry—A New Interdisciplinary Field?” (1) with the hope that the rising tide of interest in the philosophy of chemistry would spark chemical education to engage in reflection upon its own foundational precepts. In the spirit of Scerri’s invitation, we report here on a joint faculty–undergraduate seminar in the philosophy of chemistry whose participants included a philosopher of science and three chemists. Arising from student interest, the seminar was created with the goal of allowing the students to explore the foundational concepts of chemistry using the analytic methodology of contemporary philosophy of science in order to build a bridge between their scientific and humanistic curricular requirements. While courses in general philosophy of science are a standard offering, this collaboration between the departments of chemistry and philosophy was novel to the institution. Course Structure The course was structured around the model of the graduate seminar instead of the standard undergraduate lecture course in order to facilitate the participation of the varied group involved. The course was truly an exploration as the material was new to all of the participants, even the participating philosopher whose background is in philosophy of physics. Further diverse perspectives came from the three participating chemists whose specializations are physical, inorganic, and organic chemistry, respectively. This had the unintended, yet positive result of forcing to the forefront of discussions the non-monolithic nature of the discipline in a very direct way and allowed the conversation to explore the variety of approaches and assumptions present in different parts of chemical research. Of the four students enrolled, three were second-semester level chemistry students, only one having taken a philosophy course previously; the fourth was a senior double-major in philosophy and biology. Students were each asked to give presentations on a selected topic and to lead the conversation that resulted from the presentation. The lack of formal training in philosophical methods was a concern for most of the students, but student–faculty collaborative meetings in preparation of the presentations were sufficient to alleviate the problem and the presentations were of a very high quality. Assessments of student performance in the class included preparedness for the seminar presentation, three short papers, and a term paper. 880
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Course Content We began the course by working through Scerri’s article (1), in which he sketches three central issues that have taken up the lion’s share of discussion in the young field of philosophy of chemistry: (i) The Question of Reduction, (ii) Models and Explanation in Chemistry, and (iii) Realism. We then considered each of these topics individually in turn. All three of these questions have a significant history in the general literature of philosophy of science, and as such, the versions of these questions when consideration turns to chemical issues are couched in a larger discourse. For this reason, the seminar was structured so that we would first address one or two classic papers in the philosophy of science dealing with the topic for science generally and then closely read a treatment of the issue as it pertains to chemistry in an article from Hyle, which along with Foundations of Chemistry, is one of the two foci of published work in the philosophy of chemistry. The philosopher led the discussion of the background readings and it was the responsibility of the students to lead the discussion of the chemistry readings.
The Question of Reduction Perhaps the largest question in the philosophy of chemistry is the analytic or definitional question What is chemistry? One answer that is offered by some, although often found unsatisfactory by others, is that chemistry is just complex physics, i.e., chemistry is in the end reducible to physics and is not an independent discipline. This notion of reductionism and issues of the unity of science have a long and prized history in the philosophical literature. Discussion began with two very different pictures of the unity of science. The first was offered by August Comte in the opening chapter of his Course of Positive Philosophy (2), which portrays all science as ultimately reducible to a single general law and method. The second is to be found in the work of the logical positivist Otto Neurath, which is most clearly set out in his “Unified Science as Encyclopedic Integration” (3). Neurath seeks to unify science, not by reducing it to a single science, but by finding a linguistic framework in which practitioners pursue interests in distinct scientific arenas in a way that there is ultimately some ability to translate the concepts of one science into the concepts of another. Biology and chemistry, for example, are distinct sciences, yet they need to have languages that share sufficient conceptual overlap to be able to support biochemistry, which has its home in both areas.
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In the Classroom
We then turned to Robin Findlay Hendry’s article “Molecular Models and the Question of Physicalism” (4), which challenges the reducibility of chemistry to physics by considering the use made of molecular models. This topic in particular benefited from the participation of both a physical chemist with interest in protons and an inorganic chemist with interest in proteins. The plurality of methods enriched the discussion immensely.
Models and Explanation in Chemistry Questions of what constitutes a scientific explanation were central to the philosophy of science in the second half of the 20th century. The use of models in such explanations became the focus of this discussion with the advent of the so-called semantic view of scientific theories. The classic work from this movement is Nancy Cartwright’s How the Laws of Physics Lie (5) and the second essay in the book, “The Truth Doesn’t Explain Much”, was closely read. Attention was then turned to Giuseppi Del Re’s article “Models and Analogies in Science” (6) that argues in line with Cartwright that the most successful models in chemistry are the simplest and the least true. Realism The question as to whether science provides true glimpses into the world or merely useful tools for predicting its behavior was examined through the instrumentalist writing of Bas van Fraassen, in particular, the initial chapter of The Scientific Image (7), which argues against science as a direct connection to an underlying reality. In the case of chemical results, Pawel Zeidler’s “The Epistemological Status of Theoretical Models of Molecular Structure” (8) was read. Zeidler works along van Fraassen’s instrumentalist line, arguing that molecular models provide locally successful interpretations, but fail to offer true explanations of real molecular systems. Observations of the Course
Faculty Views The novelty of the content in a philosophy of chemistry course made the construction of the class both challenging and exciting. On the one hand, the paucity of the professional literature and complete lack of textbooks that one could use to easily create this sort of course made finding relevant and connected readings difficult. Augmenting the specifically chemically focused articles with more accessible readings from the history of the philosophy of science was essential both to fill the class syllabus and to introduce the participants to the central questions, concepts, and positions in which the subsequent chemical debate was couched. On the other hand, the newness of the course and the fact that this was an uncharted path gave the course a sense of truly being “live” and there was an energy from the participants that came from not being able to anticipate the coming discussion. There is not a long-standing tradition at our institution for the chemists and the philosophers to share curricular space and everyone who agreed to this pilot course entered it with the sense of it being an experiment. The general conclusion is that it was successful in beginning to build a bridge between the departments. One favorable result is that chemical examples and issues now play a much larger role in the presentation of the standard philosophy of science course. www.JCE.DivCHED.org
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Another is that there is now an increased emphasis on the role of models of different levels of detail in explaining chemical bonding in the first-year chemistry course. The physical chemistry courses also have a greater emphasis on using a variety of models as a way to understand experimental data. The various gas laws provide a particularly apt set of examples.
Students’ Views Students were asked to complete evaluations at the end of the course. Given a five-point scale ranging from very poor to excellent, all rated the course excellent. When given the response choices of “no”, “yes”, and “gladly”, all said they would gladly suggest this class to a peer. Separate guided narrative questions asked about the strengths and weaknesses of the course. Three out of four cited the seminar format and all four students cited the interaction with the faculty members as a strength. Students felt surprisingly comfortable participating in the conversation and were not intimidated. The weakness that was cited by several students is that they wanted the philosophy of chemistry to be augmented with case studies in the history of chemistry. When asked what they take away from the class, three explicitly mentioned a deeper understanding and appreciation for the subject of chemistry. In order to assess the continuing impact of the course, students were interviewed roughly two years after taking the seminar. The students were asked to comment on how the course had affected their understanding of chemistry and whether the seminar had had any impact on their other courses. Each student still had a very positive overall impression of the class. They continued to feel that the small class size and seminar format with its free-flowing discussion and close interaction with several faculty had contributed greatly to the quality of the class. When students discussed the ways that the philosophy of chemistry course had affected their work over the past two years, their views varied. Interestingly, although perhaps not surprisingly, there was a strong correlation between the topics each student led discussion on and the insights they have taken away from the seminar. For example, the student who led the discussion of the role of models and explanation in chemistry commented that he no longer views chemistry as a collection of asserted facts, but instead as a series of generalizations based on experiment. When a professor makes an assertion in class, the student now wonders how the result was arrived at and how precisely it is known rather than accepting it at face value. A second student who led the discussion of reduction emphasized that the course helped him see how different sciences are built on and related to each other. In particular, he commented on how the discussion of nuclear physics in his physics classes had informed his understanding of NMR in his organic chemistry and spectroscopy classes. He also talked about how his interest in his physics courses was increased because the seminar had helped him relate the relatively abstract physics to chemistry, which he viewed as more concrete. Considerations for Subsequent Course Offerings There is student interest in offering this sort of seminar again. For future iterations, however, several modifications are being considered. Most significant is the structure of the class. While Scerri’s taxonomy can still serve as the organizing prin-
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ciple underlying the logic of the syllabus, the three questions considered are not entirely distinct. Instead of thinking of the course as three separate units, each considering a separate question in the philosophy of chemistry, it would make the course structure more coherent to begin with an investigation of the use of models in chemistry and allow each of the questions to emerge organically. This could be facilitated by assigning to each student or pair of students a particular example of a significant chemical model or modeling technique. The students would begin the semester by writing and presenting a case study explaining how the model works and what phenomena the model was developed to explain. Student papers could then use this case study as the basis upon which to reflect on each philosophical concern as it is raised in turn. This would provide the course with deeper and more rigorous chemical content and address the concern of the students about the lack of historical connection. Conclusion While undergraduate courses on the philosophy of chemistry are novel, there is great promise that the interdisciplinary effort undertaken to create such a course will have positive
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and lasting results for both chemistry and philosophy pedagogy and curricula. This experiment not only succeeded in making the teaching of chemistry more reflective and in raising the profile of chemistry beyond the chemistry department, undertaking this course has also given rise to continuing efforts between the departments to maintain the engagement in some form. Literature Cited 1. Scerri, E. J. Chem. Educ. 2000, 77, 522–525. 2. Comte, A. Course of Positive Philosophy; AMS Press: New York, 1974. 3. Neurath, O. Unified Science as Encyclopedic Integration. In International Encyclopedia of Unified Science; University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1938; 1–27. 4. Hendry, R. Hyle 1999, 5, 143–160. 5. Cartwright, N. How the Laws of Physics Lie; Oxford University Press: New York, 1983. 6. Del Re, G. Hyle 2000, 6, 5–15. 7. Van Fraasen, B. The Scientific Image; Oxford University Press: New York, 1980. 8. Zeidler, P. Hyle 2000, 6, 17–34.
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