CREACAL · CHEMICAL REACTIONS AS CAUSES AND LAWS

CHEMICAL REACTIONS AS CAUSES AND LAWS

It is hard to overstate the importance of chemical reactions in understanding nature and sustaining life. From lighting fires and fermenting bread, to breathing, developing life-saving drugs and creating (but also tackling) climate change, there are very few activities in our everyday life that are not the result of naturally-occurring or synthetic chemical reactions. From a philosophical perspective, it is natural to think that chemical reaction statements track causal relations. Chemists often say that the interaction of an acid with a base causes the production of an ionic salt and water, or that water is produced because hydrogen and oxygen reacted with each other. However, whether reference to causation should be taken seriously is debatable and establishing that chemical reactions identify causal relations is far from obvious. For example, do chemical reactions convey genuine causal relations or are they merely functional tools to describe more complex and fundamental relations in nature? Moreover, which understanding of causation best applies to the case of chemical reactions? And, if chemical reactions correspond to causal relations, does this mean that they should be thought as tracking laws of nature? These questions are important because whether one admits causal talk in chemical discourse impacts the explanatory weight we ascribe onto the relevant scientific descriptions. In addition, given that chemistry is a special science, discussion of causation in chemistry brings forward a novel perspective through which to think of laws in nature which extends consideration of physics. So, the aim of CReaCaL is to spell out precisely how chemical reactions can be understood as candidate causal relations. This is achieved by bringing together chemical knowledge of reactions with the philosophical literature on causation. Doing so, reveals interesting features not only about chemical reactions but also about causation. The project is realised by addressing the following questions: - If chemical reactions correspond to causal relations, what sort of relations are they? - What are the purported causes and effects of these relations? - At what scale do chemical reactions occur? - Do all statements of chemical reactions correspond to genuine causal relations? By addressing these questions the project aims to offer a better understanding of the nature of chemical reactions that is informed by the extensive literature on causation in philosophy.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз