Archive for the 'Philosophy of Science' Category

I was reading Pragmatism by William James and came across an interesting passage in which James quotes from a letter he received from Wilhelm Ostwald–winner of the 1909 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “catalysis and associated fundamental studies on chemical equilibria and rates of reaction.”

“Chemists have long wrangled over the inner constitution of certain bodies called ‘tautomerous.’ Their properties seemed equally consistent with the notion that an instable hydrogen atom oscillates inside of them, or that they are instable mixtures of two bodies. Controversy raged; but never was decided. ‘It would never have begun,’ says Ostwald, ‘if the combatants had asked themselves what particular experimental fact could have been made different by one or the other view being correct. For it would then have appeared that no difference of fact could possibly ensue; and the quarrel was as unreal as if, theorizing in primitive times about the raising of dough by yeast, one party should have invoked a ‘brownie,’ while another insisted on an ‘elf’ as the true cause of the phenomenon.’”

I think today we would say that there is a practical difference between these two descriptions and that tautomeric solutions are best described as “instable mixtures of two bodies.” One-hundred years later, Ostwald’s point still seems relevant though. I wonder how many hours I’ve spent at a chalkboard arguing over two conceptions of the same fact, either of which make no practical difference whatsoever…

William James was a chemist before he was a famous psychologist and philosopher. He entered the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard in 1861 to study chemistry, but lasted less than a year. He later graduated from Harvard Medical School.

Wilhelm Ostwald was on loan to Harvard University from 1904 to 1905—two years before James gave his lectures on Pragmatism—from his home University of Leipzig, Germany. He was close to retirement at the time and increasingly interested in the philosophy of science as is evident from his correspondence with James.