Response to a letter to the editor

Abstract

Professor Needham tells me that I have misunderstood him, and I am sure he is right that I need to work harder to understand his arguments more fully and more precisely. But he has also misunderstood me, as well—no doubt because I have not expressed myself as carefully as I ought to have done. He writes that I have ‘‘clearly’’ argued that ‘‘the only possibility of representing nineteenth-century chemistry as a theoretical pursuit’’ is based on chemical atomism. I do not believe that. For instance, Lavoisien antiphlogistic theory at the beginning of the century, and chemical thermodynamics and certain aspects of reaction dynamics a few decades later, did not depend on an atomistic view of nature. I do plead guilty to the claim that ‘‘at the heart of the theoretical achievement’’ of nineteenth-century chemistry stood ‘‘atomic and molecular theory’’. But Professor Needham believes that nineteenth-century atomism did not provide chemistry with any explanations. Since I take it that a principal goal of every workable scientific theory is to provide satisfying explanations for a set of phenomena (eliding for the moment what it means to ‘‘explain’’), I have understood Needham to argue that chemical atomism was not a workable theory at that time. In the light of the thesis at the head of this paragraph, Needham’s claim thus has the effect, in my view, of denying most (not all, I concede!) theoretical content in chemistry as it was pursued in the nineteenth century. On the contrary, it is my view that chemical atomism is theory in the fullest sense, and moreover successful theory (in its historical context) at that. That was the principal point I wanted to make. I certainly did not intend to cast aspersions at my colleagues in philosophy; I join him in exhorting a closer alliance of philosophy of chemistry with history of chemistry—a ‘‘joint enterprise from which we all can learn’’, as Professor Needham rightly expresses it. I know that I have more work to do to more fully understand Professor Needham’s position, and to continue to educate myself in the philosophy of chemistry. But his response suggests that,