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Is Water H2O?: Evidence, Realism and Pluralism
This book exhibits deep philosophical quandaries and intricacies of the historical development of science lying behind a simple and fundamental item of common sense in modern science, namely the composition of water as H 2 O. Three main phases of development are critically re-examined, covering the historical period from the 1760s to the 1860s: the Chemical Revolution (through which water first became recognized as a compound, not an element), early electrochemistry (by which water’s compound nature was confirmed), and early atomic chemistry (in which water started out as HO and became H 2 O). In each case, the author concludes that the empirical evidence available at the time was not decisive in settling the central debates and therefore the consensus that was reached was unjustified or at least premature. This leads to a significant re-examination of the realism question in the philosophy of science and a unique new advocacy for pluralism in science. Each chapter contains three layers, allowing readers to follow various parts of the book at their chosen level of depth and detail. The second major study in "complementary science", this book offers a rare combination of philosophy, history and science in a bid to improve scientific knowledge through history and philosophy of science.
337 pages, Hardcover
First published April 30, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 17, 2024
It’s one part, history of chemistry, one part philosophy of science.
He wants to argue for a new position in the philosophy of science, which he calls “active realism.” Aas near as I can tell is actually anti-realism with cheerful marketing. “Who could say whether atoms exist, but practical chemistry works very well and isn’t that the important thing?”
I think this is a plausibly sensible view, but calling it realism is pure propaganda. Normally when we talk about realism in the science, the intent to say, the terms in our theory, genuinely correspond to things out there in the universe. In active realism, that is not true at all, they merely indicate that we have learned to do certain operations, correctly. Chang specifically describes Ptolmeic astronomy as a mature successful theory.
He wants to argue for a new position in the philosophy of science, which he calls “active realism.” Aas near as I can tell is actually anti-realism with cheerful marketing. “Who could say whether atoms exist, but practical chemistry works very well and isn’t that the important thing?”
I think this is a plausibly sensible view, but calling it realism is pure propaganda. Normally when we talk about realism in the science, the intent to say, the terms in our theory, genuinely correspond to things out there in the universe. In active realism, that is not true at all, they merely indicate that we have learned to do certain operations, correctly. Chang specifically describes Ptolmeic astronomy as a mature successful theory.
August 16, 2018
In fits and starts, I've read a fair amount of philosophy of science over the last few years. It's an intriguing, but often very frustrating, subject. This book is by far the best take on the subject I've found. David Bloor lays out very clearly what I believe to be the correct ontological status of scientific knowledge, and while Chang only cites Bloor once and makes no overt identification with his ideas, Is Water H2O works from the understanding that many of the Strong Program's claims are true and applies them to the traditional problems of the philosophy of science while at the same time bringing profusion of new evidence to support them.
I don't remember what degree it was, but somewhere in the back and forth criticisms of the Strong Program somebody caricatured the position by saying that self-consistent relativism require apologism for rejected scientific theories which were true in their time. Bloor dismissed this accusation out of hand, but Chang takes it as the premise of his entire endeavor, redeeming its apparent absurdity by showing how wrong the conventional understanding of science that implies that absurdity actually is.
The main conceit he uses to accomplish that is to challenge the "truth" of the universally held scientific belief that water is H2O. The philosophical point here is that, as many philosophers of science have discovered to their dismay, there seems to be no way to logically justify the intuitive correspondence between those words and the thing they describe. On its own, that's an easy thing to dismiss as a pedantic and irrelevant issue only of concern to philosophers. Chang brings that point to life by illustrating how it is also pragmatically true. That H2O is just one of many ways that people have described water, which has as many discrepancies from more modern conceptions as its original description as an element. Moreover, the differences here aren't merely matters of translation. Yes, you could easily imagine substituting elemental water, H2O, or some equivalent quark notation, as easily as substituting Wasser or agua. The difference is that those scientific terms refer to the experimental contexts in which they are true. They emphasize some properties and descriptive systems at the expense of others.
The series of competing versions of water and the scientific schools and hypotheses attached to each provides a more compelling demonstration of the underdetermined nature of scientific knowledge than anything in Bloor. The picture of science that emerges here is a web of discrete "systems of practice," each of which prioritizes certain problems, frames them with certain concepts, and applies them with certain technical and conceptual manipulations. The crucial bit is that each of the elements in that web remain "true" as long as they solve the problems they are applied to. This view of science is most explicitly at odds with Karl Popper's falsificationism because it provides many important roles for knowledge that has apparently been falsified.
In fact, the main lesson of the case studies in the first three chapters that falsification is rare, if not impossible, in scientific practice. The chemical revolution, apparently hailed as one of the most clear-cut examples of a bad hypothesis killed by decisive rejection, actually shows quite the opposite. Chang gives a revisionist (or perhaps more accurately, counter-revisionist) telling of the chemical revolution which finds no evidence for such a clear falsification. Instead, he says the phlogiston theory was wrongly rejected because it failed to answer questions the rising dominance school of chemists were interested in, despite the fact that their alternative was already apparently falsified by its failure to answer questions the phlogistonists were interested in. Strict falsificationism would therefore require rejecting both, despite the ability of each to account for some relevant phenomena. The first three chapters recount how the three developments in chemistry widely understood to prove water is H2O in fact failed to offer conclusive proof against alternative theories. By the time H2O was in fact demonstrated to be the formula of water, that description was already being made obsolete by more active descriptions of the interactions between molecules.
Chang's point here is an extension of "holism" in philosophy of science, the idea that any negative experimental finding could either disprove the hypothesis being tested or disprove some related assumption. He goes farther than previous holist thinkers, though, by embracing and championing the tension between various schools of thought about those assumptions. He advocates what he calls pluralism, an approach that at least suggests caution on dismissing otherwise functional hypotheses because of their failure to address some potential objection, and at most actively demands the application of debunked schools of thought to new problems.
The first three chapters are interesting exercises in the history of science and especially for their clear support of what I (unlike Chang) would not hesitate to call a relativist understanding of science. They are a bit undermined by their strange structure, however. Chang is a very contemporary writer. It's actually a bit strange. He doesn't do any of the pop-science accessibility tricks and the text itself can be fairly formal and dense, if not ever really hard to follow. But it is also full of hyperlinks to other parts of the text and personal asides, though always strictly related to the topic at hand. It feels like it was written for a blog, except not in any of the personable, intimate ways. The reason I don't like this is mostly just that each chapter has a telescoping structure. It covers the same material three times, at three different levels of detail. So if you are reading the book straight through, you get this spiral structure, returning to the same ideas over and over. Sometimes that is a good way to learn through repetition, but other times it feels a bit tedious, especially when the sections in the third part of the chapter are essentially footnotes for an idea was dropped in the first part rather than following from any relevant previous section of the third part.
Chapters four and five are completely different and both excellent. I'm a bit surprised that a history of science book diverging to offer proclamations on the philosophy and practice of science was so welcome to me. I feel like the tradition of combining historically descriptive, philosophically descriptive, and pragmatically normative work on science is misguided, in ways that seem like they should be more obvious to the smart people in this field. Chang avoids this problem in part because he clearly doesn't just find what he set out to look for. Unlike what I remember from Kuhn, Chang finds some examples of scientific controversies that match his prescription and others that don't. He isn't simply telling scientists to do what they have always and must inevitably do. As for the philosophizing, obviously I found this less offensive in large part because I agreed with his position.
But what a difference being right makes! In his last three chapters, Godfrey-Smith found himself laying out a philosophy of science bending over backwards to accommodate all the giant holes knocked in realism over the past hundred years, focusing more than anything on justifying conclusion he wanted to reach without being obviously wrong. Chang has the luxury of advancing a position that doesn't contradict any of those giant holes. That means he can be not only confidence is philosophical standing, but excited and exuberant about making it into something people can actually get behind. Unlike Bloor, who is a staunch proponent of relativism in general but ultimately advances it as a necessary premise of the scientific study of science, Chang is in the cultural trenches already, knocking down the old, decrepit realist foundations of science while at the same time launching a new, positively framed program, not just consistent with relativism (though again, he never embraces the term), but actually excited about it--something that falls outside of the remit of Bloor's descriptive work.
So Chapter 4 is almost a gleeful romp through ruins of the weak conjectures philosophers have put forward to rescue realism, accompanied by the joyful news that we have lost nothing with their passing. Chapter 5 is a call to action, and exhortation for scientists to act according to the principles of pluralism. Much of the chapter is occupied with preempting pragmatic objections to pluralism and offering other examples of its benefits in addition to those presented in the first three chapters. This material is still interesting, though somewhat less so given that pragmatic advice that must be followed by scientists as a community inevitably feels like it really must be aimed at someone else, who has more decision power about these things. The most fascinating implication here is for historians of science, who are charged with producing "complementary science," a kind of conservation program for keeping debunked ideas in practice after scientists discard them, on the supposition that they might hold unique knowledge that would otherwise be lost and which might be useful again later (or is simply worthwhile for its own sake).
I don't remember what degree it was, but somewhere in the back and forth criticisms of the Strong Program somebody caricatured the position by saying that self-consistent relativism require apologism for rejected scientific theories which were true in their time. Bloor dismissed this accusation out of hand, but Chang takes it as the premise of his entire endeavor, redeeming its apparent absurdity by showing how wrong the conventional understanding of science that implies that absurdity actually is.
The main conceit he uses to accomplish that is to challenge the "truth" of the universally held scientific belief that water is H2O. The philosophical point here is that, as many philosophers of science have discovered to their dismay, there seems to be no way to logically justify the intuitive correspondence between those words and the thing they describe. On its own, that's an easy thing to dismiss as a pedantic and irrelevant issue only of concern to philosophers. Chang brings that point to life by illustrating how it is also pragmatically true. That H2O is just one of many ways that people have described water, which has as many discrepancies from more modern conceptions as its original description as an element. Moreover, the differences here aren't merely matters of translation. Yes, you could easily imagine substituting elemental water, H2O, or some equivalent quark notation, as easily as substituting Wasser or agua. The difference is that those scientific terms refer to the experimental contexts in which they are true. They emphasize some properties and descriptive systems at the expense of others.
The series of competing versions of water and the scientific schools and hypotheses attached to each provides a more compelling demonstration of the underdetermined nature of scientific knowledge than anything in Bloor. The picture of science that emerges here is a web of discrete "systems of practice," each of which prioritizes certain problems, frames them with certain concepts, and applies them with certain technical and conceptual manipulations. The crucial bit is that each of the elements in that web remain "true" as long as they solve the problems they are applied to. This view of science is most explicitly at odds with Karl Popper's falsificationism because it provides many important roles for knowledge that has apparently been falsified.
In fact, the main lesson of the case studies in the first three chapters that falsification is rare, if not impossible, in scientific practice. The chemical revolution, apparently hailed as one of the most clear-cut examples of a bad hypothesis killed by decisive rejection, actually shows quite the opposite. Chang gives a revisionist (or perhaps more accurately, counter-revisionist) telling of the chemical revolution which finds no evidence for such a clear falsification. Instead, he says the phlogiston theory was wrongly rejected because it failed to answer questions the rising dominance school of chemists were interested in, despite the fact that their alternative was already apparently falsified by its failure to answer questions the phlogistonists were interested in. Strict falsificationism would therefore require rejecting both, despite the ability of each to account for some relevant phenomena. The first three chapters recount how the three developments in chemistry widely understood to prove water is H2O in fact failed to offer conclusive proof against alternative theories. By the time H2O was in fact demonstrated to be the formula of water, that description was already being made obsolete by more active descriptions of the interactions between molecules.
Chang's point here is an extension of "holism" in philosophy of science, the idea that any negative experimental finding could either disprove the hypothesis being tested or disprove some related assumption. He goes farther than previous holist thinkers, though, by embracing and championing the tension between various schools of thought about those assumptions. He advocates what he calls pluralism, an approach that at least suggests caution on dismissing otherwise functional hypotheses because of their failure to address some potential objection, and at most actively demands the application of debunked schools of thought to new problems.
The first three chapters are interesting exercises in the history of science and especially for their clear support of what I (unlike Chang) would not hesitate to call a relativist understanding of science. They are a bit undermined by their strange structure, however. Chang is a very contemporary writer. It's actually a bit strange. He doesn't do any of the pop-science accessibility tricks and the text itself can be fairly formal and dense, if not ever really hard to follow. But it is also full of hyperlinks to other parts of the text and personal asides, though always strictly related to the topic at hand. It feels like it was written for a blog, except not in any of the personable, intimate ways. The reason I don't like this is mostly just that each chapter has a telescoping structure. It covers the same material three times, at three different levels of detail. So if you are reading the book straight through, you get this spiral structure, returning to the same ideas over and over. Sometimes that is a good way to learn through repetition, but other times it feels a bit tedious, especially when the sections in the third part of the chapter are essentially footnotes for an idea was dropped in the first part rather than following from any relevant previous section of the third part.
Chapters four and five are completely different and both excellent. I'm a bit surprised that a history of science book diverging to offer proclamations on the philosophy and practice of science was so welcome to me. I feel like the tradition of combining historically descriptive, philosophically descriptive, and pragmatically normative work on science is misguided, in ways that seem like they should be more obvious to the smart people in this field. Chang avoids this problem in part because he clearly doesn't just find what he set out to look for. Unlike what I remember from Kuhn, Chang finds some examples of scientific controversies that match his prescription and others that don't. He isn't simply telling scientists to do what they have always and must inevitably do. As for the philosophizing, obviously I found this less offensive in large part because I agreed with his position.
But what a difference being right makes! In his last three chapters, Godfrey-Smith found himself laying out a philosophy of science bending over backwards to accommodate all the giant holes knocked in realism over the past hundred years, focusing more than anything on justifying conclusion he wanted to reach without being obviously wrong. Chang has the luxury of advancing a position that doesn't contradict any of those giant holes. That means he can be not only confidence is philosophical standing, but excited and exuberant about making it into something people can actually get behind. Unlike Bloor, who is a staunch proponent of relativism in general but ultimately advances it as a necessary premise of the scientific study of science, Chang is in the cultural trenches already, knocking down the old, decrepit realist foundations of science while at the same time launching a new, positively framed program, not just consistent with relativism (though again, he never embraces the term), but actually excited about it--something that falls outside of the remit of Bloor's descriptive work.
So Chapter 4 is almost a gleeful romp through ruins of the weak conjectures philosophers have put forward to rescue realism, accompanied by the joyful news that we have lost nothing with their passing. Chapter 5 is a call to action, and exhortation for scientists to act according to the principles of pluralism. Much of the chapter is occupied with preempting pragmatic objections to pluralism and offering other examples of its benefits in addition to those presented in the first three chapters. This material is still interesting, though somewhat less so given that pragmatic advice that must be followed by scientists as a community inevitably feels like it really must be aimed at someone else, who has more decision power about these things. The most fascinating implication here is for historians of science, who are charged with producing "complementary science," a kind of conservation program for keeping debunked ideas in practice after scientists discard them, on the supposition that they might hold unique knowledge that would otherwise be lost and which might be useful again later (or is simply worthwhile for its own sake).
July 21, 2015
This book isn't really about the chemical composition of water. It is about critical awareness. How do we know that water is H2O? How did scientists agree on that formula? Did they have the right to ? Interestingly, Chang seems to argue that they did not. They had "subtle and sophisticated reasons for arriving at that belief," but pure scientific inquiry was not one of them. This is a tale of competition, peer pressure, hubris, and "luck."
Chang would prefer to allow multiple theories in science much more time to run down the track (hence "Pluralism" in the subtitle). He is not a relativist, but he believes complementary, or even contradictory, theories should be continued even when the consensus is going in a different direction. This might even save time in the end. One of his biggest concerns is with the typical belief that we've got it right today, while those in the past did not, and those in the future will merely agree with us. But what is true today is questioned tomorrow. And not just in science.
Chang would prefer to allow multiple theories in science much more time to run down the track (hence "Pluralism" in the subtitle). He is not a relativist, but he believes complementary, or even contradictory, theories should be continued even when the consensus is going in a different direction. This might even save time in the end. One of his biggest concerns is with the typical belief that we've got it right today, while those in the past did not, and those in the future will merely agree with us. But what is true today is questioned tomorrow. And not just in science.
November 3, 2022
I’m neither a chemistry nor a philosophy major. But, I very much enjoyed reading this book and I would say it has changed my view toward science. This book is structured in a way that a general audience could grasp the idea by reading only the first section of each chapter and that is what I did!
December 17, 2025
As a swimmer, I spend a lot of time in the water, and understanding its philosophical and deeper perspective has helped me connect with it in a more meaningful way.
February 4, 2016
A book whose purpose is to question scientific history. Interesting, but slow.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews