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When chemical instruments are used in the laboratory, a specimen undergoes changes at the microscopic level. Depending on the instrument, the specimen absorbs or emits radiation. Alternatively, radiation is scattered, refracted, or diffracted. We often read that microscopic events produced from chemical instrumentation are real, as opposed to mere artifacts of the experiment. But exactly what does this mean? This philosophical question underlies a continual dilemma for the experimental chemist, whether to declare triumphantly that his/her findings reveal some insight about a chemical substance or to refrain from such a judgment for fear of having produced a mere artificial effect. Of course, a commonplace position is that the artificiality of laboratory techniques can be separated, in principle, from the real effects, because these techniques enable scientists to break the influence of laboratory constructions on experimental “ facts.” But some commentators have resurrected the fairly skeptical view that such declarations of success are grossly overstated because the interference from various instrumental techniques, laboratory equipment, and theoretical ideas precludes the possibility of exposing properties of independently existing substance. If we address this philosophical question by exploring techniques of chemical instrumentation, we find that the categories of a laboratory artifact and real effect are not mutually exclusive. As I argue here, the experimental phenomena of chemical research are both real and artificially produced from laboratory apparatus, manufactured conditions, and sophisticated techniques of researchers. The plan of this chapter is as follows: examine the character of analytical instruments in chemistry (section 1); explain the difference between an artifact and a real effect (section 2); examine the process of virtual witnessing in chemistry (section 3); explore how instruments are designed to mimic known chemical or physical processes (section 4); introduce the philosophical importance of noise-blocking techniques (section 5); and conclude with brief remarks about experimental reduction (section 6). The similarities and differences between absorption spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy are discussed. In this chapter I adopt a functional orientation to our understanding chemical substance, according to which a specimen is known by those capacities that technicians try to exploit during laboratory research.

Chemists move habitually and with credible success—if sometimes unreflectively—between two worlds. One is the laboratory, with its macroscopic powders, crystals, solutions, and intractable sludge, as well as the things that are smelly or odorless, toxic or beneficial, pure or impure, colored, or white. The other is the invisible world of molecules, each with its characteristic composition and structure, its internal dynamics and its ways of reacting with the other molecules around it. Perhaps because they are so used to it, chemists rarely explain how they are able to hold two seemingly disparate worlds together in thought and practice. And contemporary philosophy of science has had little to say about how chemists are able to pose and solve problems, and, in particular, to posit and construct molecules, while simultaneously entertaining two apparently incompatible strata of reality. Yet chemistry continues to generate highly reliable knowledge, and indeed to add to the furniture of the universe, with a registry of over ten million well-characterized new compounds. The philosophy of science has long been dominated by logical positivism, and the assumptions attendant on its use of predicate logic to examine science, as well as its choice of physics as the archetype of a science. Positivism thus tends to think of science in terms of an axiomatized theory describing an already given reality and cast in a uniform symbolic language, the language of predicate logic. (See especially the locus classicus of this position, Carnap, 1937.) We here wish to question certain positivist assumptions about scientific rationality, based on an alternative view brought into focus by the reflective examination of a case study drawn from contemporary chemistry. Our reflections owe something to Leibniz (1686, 1695, 1714), Husserl (1922), Kuhn (1970), and Polanyi (1960, 1966), and draw on the earlier writings of both of us—Hoffmann (1995; Hoffmann & Laszlo, 1991) and Grosholz (1991; Grosholz & Yakira, 1998). We will offer a nonreductionist account of methods of analysis and synthesis in chemistry.