Monte Cairns

Essentialist theories of natural kinds, widely discredited by philosophers of the life sciences, remain an important focal point in recent philosophy of chemistry. Within that literature, one popular position is that gold, hydrogen, and the other members of the periodic table are observer-independent and objectively delineable kinds, each defined by their essential property of discrete nuclear charge. This is ‘microstructural’ essentialism about chemical elements, the core claim of which in the modern setting is that nuclear charge determines the properties of elements and the substances they constitute. In this paper, I aim to demonstrate that detailed attention to the empirical relationships between nuclear charge, atomic species, and chemical substances provides reasons to doubt microstructural essentialism about chemical elements.

This paper distinguishes and critically evaluates a distinctive class of objection to the Argument from Inductive Risk. ‘Expertise-objections’ question the fitness of scientists to engage in moral decision-making during research, on grounds of deficiencies in scientists’ relative expertise. Such critiques bring considerations of inductive risk into important dialogue with wider literature from moral philosophy; but, once contextualised therein, it becomes apparent that expertise-objections fail to decisively prohibit the articulation of moral duties for scientists.

That science is value-dependent has been taken to raise problems for the democratic legitimacy of scientifically-informed public policy. An increasingly common solution is to propose that science itself ought to be ‘democratised.’ Of the literature aiming to provide principled means of facilitating such, most has been largely concerned with developing accounts of how public values might be identified in order to resolve scientific value-judgements. Through a case-study of the World Health Organisation’s 2009 redefinition of ‘pandemic’ in response to H1N1, this paper proposes that this emphasis might be unhelpfully pre-emptive, pending more thorough consideration of the question of whose values different varieties of epistemic risk ought to be negotiated in reference to. A choice of pandemic definition inevitably involves the consideration of a particular variety of epistemic risk, described here as ontic risk. In analogy with legislative versus judicial contexts, I argue that the democratisation of ontic risk assessments could bring inductive risk assessments within the scope of democratic control without necessitating that those inductive risk assessments be independently subject to democratic processes. This possibility is emblematic of a novel strategy for mitigating the opportunity costs that successful democratisation would incur for scientists: careful attention to the different normative stakes of different epistemic risks can provide principled grounds on which to propose that the democratisation of science need only be partial.

The potential reducibility of chemical entities to their physical bases is a matter of dispute between ontological reductionists on one hand, and emergentists on the other. However, relevant debates typically revolve around the reducibility of so-called ‘higher-level’ chemical entities, such as molecules. Perhaps surprisingly, even committed proponents of emergence for these higher-level chemical entities appear to accept that the ‘lowest-level’ chemical entities – atomic species – are reducible to their physical bases. In particular, the microstructural view of chemical elements, actively developed and defended by emergentists, appears to hold that the explanatory power of nuclear charge justifies being reductionist about atomic species. My first task in this paper is to establish that nuclear charge cannot ultimately provide explanations sufficient to justify a reductionist approach to atomic species, unless we abandon the persuasive intuition that the presence of an element in a substance ought to explain the properties of that substance. The ‘missing piece’ for explaining the properties of substances by way of their elemental constituents is the electronegativity values of participant atoms. But electronegativity is a strikingly disunified concept that appears distinctly unamenable to analysis by way of fundamental physical principles. Through evaluating the uncertain physical identity of electronegativity, as well as its widespread and indispensable epistemic utility in chemical practice, I argue that electronegativity provides compelling grounds to seriously consider emergence for atomic species.