Natural Kinds and Genesis by Umphrey Stewart;

Author:Umphrey, Stewart;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

From Substances to Particles

“Chemistry is the science of substances—their structure, their properties, and the reactions that change them into other substances.”[14] Substances are of two sorts: elements and their compounds. All are regarded as continuants belonging to disjoint kinds, which theoretical chemistry defines in terms of microconstitutive or microstructural types. These are among the principal stereotokens and stereotypes in chemical theory. Are they also natural kinds? We must look more closely, to make sure we have not hit fool’s pay-dirt. I begin with water.

Although chemists agree that water is H2O, they do so in full awareness of such complications as the following. (1) Liquid water contains the polymeric forms (H2O)2, (H2O)3, and so forth. Would it not be more accurate, then, to say that water is (H2O)n where n ≥ 1? (2) Linguistically-oriented philosophers want to understand why salt water and runoff are called “water,” whereas tea and human bodies are not.[15] These issues lie beyond the purview of chemistry, and yet some purity issues are germane. For instance, chemists have discovered that liquid water cannot be just (H2O)n, since it is “amphiprotic”; it acts as both an acid and a base, and thus reacts with itself. There is always present in it a dynamic equilibrium described by the reaction equation

2H2O ↔ H3O+ + OH-

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