Abstract
The aim of this paper is to engage with the interplay between representational content and design in chemistry and to explore some of its epistemological consequences. Constraints on representational content arising from the aspectual structure of representation can be manipulated by design. Designs are epistemologically important because representational content, hence our knowledge of target systems in chemistry, can change with design. The significance of this claim is that while it has been recognised that the way one conveys information makes a difference to the inferences one can draw from representations in spite of the invariance of informational content, the present paper argues that in chemistry and biochemistry it is often the case that designs have cognitive priority relative to informational content.
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Notes
I draw here on Lopes (1996, pp. 3–4).
By “abstract representation”, I do not mean “abstract direct representation”—a strategy of theory construction Weisberg (2007) contrasts with the “indirect” representation of phenomenon via modelling. The kinds of abstract representations I refer to here are model-based representations.
However, the medium of representation will impact on aspectual structure here.
Nor is Goodman interested in the use of symbols in linguistic pragmatics—the use of symbols in illocutionary acts because these have little to do with “the nominative or predicative aspect of symbols, not their assertive or interrogative force, and [I] have taken characters more as predicates or labels than as sentences” (ibid, pp. 154–155).
See also Woody (2004, p. 781), where she draws in John Haughland’s idea of a “scheme in which a broad set of possible contents can be represented by a corresponding set of representations, themselves governed by unified sets of rules for both generation and application”.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thanks the participants of the 20th Annual Symposium of the International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry at Florida Atlantic University for their questions and comments, especially Ann-Sophie Barwich and Tami Spector.
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Fisher, G. Content, design, and representation in chemistry. Found Chem 19, 17–28 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-017-9275-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-017-9275-6