Joachim Schummer

Legal regulation has a substantial impact on the development of technologies. Depending on its scope, structure, and effectiveness, regulation can essentially shape the research, development, production, commercialization, and consumption of emerging technologies in various ways. The lack of regulation, or of corresponding enforcement, can lead to the infringement of rights, harm to workers, consumers, and the environment, and to the neglect of the public interest. On the other hand, too strict regulations, based on incomplete information or excessive caution, may equally cause harm by omitting the potential benefits or by distorting and delaying the technological development. At the current stage, nanotechnologies affect many areas of law: occupational health and safety, environ-

The paper reappraises the operational definition of elements, adopted in the late eighteenth century, by investigating both epistemic discontinuities and continuities within the broader epistemological and cultural context. The first part points out the radical disruption that the operational definition implied for most of science, which consisted in giving up explanation, the primary goal of natural philosophy, because the new elements had to be discovered. The operational turn in chemistry is then compared to several well-discussed “revolutions,” including the Kantian, relativistic, and quantum revolutions in physics, which similarly modified our understanding of fundamental concepts of natural philosophy, such as time, space, and causation, by relating them to human capacities.

Societal and ethical implications of nanotechnology have become a hot topic of public debates in many countries because both revolutionary changes and strong public concerns are expected from its development. Because nanotechnology is, at this point, mostly articulated in visionary and futuristic terms, it is difficult to apply standard methods of technology assessment and even more difficult to consider it in engineering ethics courses. In this article, the authors suggest using selected science fiction stories in the engineering ethics classroom to provide students with ethical skills and cultural knowledge required for engaging in public debates and for responsible decision making. Against the background of general debates on teaching engineering ethics, they do so by discussing the advantages and possible drawbacks of this approach and by presenting two examples of nano-science fiction classics.

This paper presents an epistemological approach to the investigation of material properties that is opposed to both phenomenalistic epistemology and recent linguistical and ontological accounts of matter/mass terms. Emphasis is laid on the inherent context dependence of material properties. It is shown that, if this is taken seriously, some deep epistemological problems arise, like unavoidable uncertainty, incompleteness, inductivity, and nonderivableness. It is further argued that some widely held epistemological accounts, namely that of essentialism, constructivism, and pragmatism, all reveal some serious defects if related to the recognition of materials. In order to responsibly manage our material environment, a more realistic estimation of our epistemic abilities and prospects is suggested.

This paper investigates the development of nanotechnology from three different points of view: as a new technology, as social dynamics, and as an ideology. It argues that nanotechnology is not a new technology but a new social dynamics guided by programmatic ideas and situated at the interface between science and the public. Rather than being determined by social constructivism, the main argument is based on the poor scientific and technological identity of nanotechnology. Finally the paper concludes that nanotechnology is to be considered an extension and increase of materials science and engineering, not only scientifically but in particular socially and ideologically, by pointing out common characteristics and differences.

Since the publication of Part I of our joint special issue on Nanotech Challenges (see Techné 8.2 & Hyle 10.2), several international conferences have taken place that brought together scholars from the humanities and the social, natural, and engineering sciences to reflect on the challenges posed by nanotechnology. These included Nanotechnology in Science, Economy and Society , University of Marburg, 13-15 January 2005; Nano-Ethics, University of South Carolina, 2-6 March 2005; Nano Before There Was Nano , Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, PA, 18-19 March 2005. In addition, numerous research groups worldwide, who used to investigate the science-technology-society interfaces, have put nanotechnology at the top of their agenda; international expert groups are being formed; and national centers will soon be established in the US and UK.

In 2002 the American Chemical Society (ACS) asked its members to submit proposals for the "ten most beautiful experiments in chemistry" (C&EN, Nov. 18, 2002, p. 5) and then proudly published the result of the vote in its Chemical and Engineering News magazine (C&EN, Aug. 25, 2003, pp. 27-30). Democratic as the procedure is, it avoids asking critical questions: What is an experiment? What is beauty? What is chemistry? In fact, you need not be able to give an answer to these questions in order to vote. We could even imagine none of the voters being able to answer any of the questions in explicit terms. And yet, the members of the society might correctly consider the result valid, not only with regard to the top ten list but also regarding its implicit definitions of what ‘experiment’, ‘beauty’, and ‘chemistry’ means. The result thus reflects the tacit knowledge and the unquestioned feelings of the majority, as they have previously been trained to respond to such unusual questions, and helps newcomers to acculturate easily. However, such implicit consensus definitions and assessments are neither binding for non-members, nor suitable for explicit debates. Prompted by the questions of what a beautiful experiment in chemistry is, you might repeat the top ten list you have learnt by heart, but otherwise remain silent

Given the rich diversity of research fields usually ascribed to chemistry in a broad sense, the present paper tries to dig our characteristic parts of chemistry that can be conceptually distinguished from interdisciplinary, applied, and specialized subfields of chemistry, and that may be called chemistry in a very narrow sense, or 'the chemical core of chemistry'. Unlike historical, ontological, and 'anti-reductive' approaches, I use a conceptual approach together with some methodological implications that allow to develop step by step a kind of cognitive architecture for chemistry, which basically contains: (1) systematic chemical knowledge on the experimental level; (2) clarification of chemical species; (3) chemical classification systems; (4) theoretical foundation through the chemical theory of structural formulas. In a succeeding paper the results will be checked for resisting physicalistic reduction

Philosophy of science arose from debates among scientists about the right method of pursuing true knowledge at times when modern science was only in its infancy. The epistemological heritage is still reflected in the corresponding terms in French, épistémologie, and in German, Wissenschaftstheorie. Another root derives from the meaning of philosophy, as in ‘natural philosophy’, which was used to denote the physical sciences still in the nineteenth century before it was split off and received its particular metaphysical meaning. Yet, besides epistemology and metaphysics, philosophy has many other branches from which reflections on science are useful. One such branch is ethics, such as chemistry is a branch of the sciences. Thus, from a systematical point of view, ethics of chemistry is a proper part of philosophy of science, whether or not any of the nineteenth-century classics said anything meaningful about that. It is that systematical background against which ‘philosophy of chemistry’ receives its full meaning. Since HYLE is devoted to philosophy of chemistry, we open a discussion on ethics of chemistry with this special issue. (For a comprehensive list of topics, see our Call for Papers .).

Referring to the Whig Party, the former political opponents of the Tories in Great Britain, British historian Herbert Butterfield once coined the term ‘Whiggish’ historiography for any account that looks at the past from the perspective of the present, as if the goal of the past were the achievement of the present. Thus, a ‘Whiggish’ history of science carefully ignores everything of the past that does not suit the idea of a steady growth of science towards the current state. Strangely enough, that approach has been prominent in philosophy too, from Hegel to recent philosophy science, so that we could equally speak of ‘Hegelian historiography’.

Historians of science, like all historians, know well that every account of the history of science is necessarily an interpretation of the history of science. It requires decisions on what is important and what not, it requires ordering, contextualizing, and interpreting the available material, and presenting the results in a final form that sounds plausible to readers. Because a majority of the readers of histories of science are scientists, the degree of plausibility and acceptability depends on what scientists expect from the historiography of science. As a rule, scientists expect much, too much than historians of science can fulfill without giving up their scholarly standards. Indeed, many scientist wish to read entertaining stories that make science, or their discipline, look particular attractive and interesting to a broader public. They may have their personal heroes, schools, or nations that they expect to be duly honored and celebrated. They want historians to focus on what they consider essential in order to carve socio-historical identities of disciplines or subdisciplines. They like to see progress in the historical development with one or the other revolution. They are yearning for meaning of the historical whole, such that individual scientific activities, including their own, make sense in the whole, and that one can draw extrapolations from the past to provide directions and goals for the future. In order to meet all these expectations, a meta-narrative is required that professional historians are reluctant to adopt. And so scientists are inclined to write their own histories of science for personal satisfaction. In chemistry, the most powerful meta-narrative that satisfies all the mentioned and other historiographic needs of chemists is a story about “chemistry versus nature”. It was invented and is still cultivated by chemists alone, without support and without objections thus far, from historians of chemistry. While the story has provided strong metaphysical orientation to chemists, it has caused rather alienation and hostility outside of chemistry. In this paper I will provide a brief history of the meta-narrative “chemistry versus nature”..

As supposed in the last Editorial (HYLE, 5-1, p. 78), our special topic ‘Models in Chemistry’ has attracted new attention to the philosophy of chemistry. Only during the past couple of month, the number of visitors of the HYLE website has nearly doubled to some 1,600 per month. There is nothing comparable in the whole field of philosophy of science, as there is no other science having such a lot to catch up on philosophical work. At the same time, this means a great challenge to meet the expectation of such a large and heterogeneous readership.