The Evolution of Chemical Knowledge: A Formal Setting for its Analysis (Wissenschaft und Philosophie – Science and Philosophy – Sciences et Philosophie)

Description

Chemistry shapes and creates the disposition of the world's resources and provides novel substances for the welfare and hazard of our civilisation at an exponential rate. Can we model the evolution of chemical knowledge? This book not only provides a positive answer to the question, it provides the formal models and available data to model chemical knowledge as a complex dynamical system based on the mutual interaction of the social, semiotic and material systems of chemistry. These systems, which have evolved over the history, include the scientists and institutions supporting chemical knowledge (social system); theories, concepts and forms of communication (semiotic system) and the substances, reactions and technologies (material system) central for the chemical practice. These three systems, which have traditionally been mostly studied in isolation, are brought together in this book in a grand historical narrative, on the basis of comprehensive data sets and supplemented by appropriate tools for their formal analysis. We thereby develop a comprehensive picture of the evolution of chemistry, needed for better understanding the past, present and future of chemistry as a discipline. The interdisciplinary character of this book and its non-technical language make it an ideal complement to more traditional material in undergraduate and graduate courses in chemistry, history of science and digital humanities. Foreword Preface Acknowledgements Contents Part I Chemical Knowledge as a Complex Dynamical System 1 Introduction 1.1 Knowledge and Scientific Knowledge 1.2 Chemical Knowledge at the Centre of Material, Social and Semiotic Interactions 1.3 Chemistry's Benefits from Studying the Evolution of its Knowledge 2 Modelling the Evolution of Chemical Knowledge 2.1 Systems and Complex Systems 2.2 Chemical Knowledge and its Three Systems 2.2.1 The Social System 2.2.2 The Semiotic System 2.2.3 The Material System 3 Evolution of the Constitutive Systems of Chemical Knowledge 3.1 Evolution of the Social System 3.2 Evolution of the Semiotic System 3.3 Evolution of the Material System 4 Interactions Between Systems, Their Differences and Environments 4.1 Material-Semiotic Interactions 4.2 Social-Semiotic Interactions 4.3 Material-Social Interactions 4.4 Lavoisier: Bridging Systems of Chemical Knowledge 4.5 Interactions Between the Material, the Semiotic and the Social System of Chemistry 4.6 Differences Among the Constitutive Systems of Chemical Knowledge and Their Temporalities 4.7 Environments of the Constitutive Systems of Chemical Knowledge Part II Data and Mathematical and Computational Formalisms for the Analysis of Chemical Knowledge 5 Data 5.1 Material System 5.2 Social System 5.3 Semiotic System 6 Methods 6.1 Hypergraphs 6.2 Complexity Measures 6.3 Time Series Analysis 6.4 Statistical Physics Methods 6.5 Agent-Based Modelling 6.6 Language Theory 6.7 Formal Concept Analysis 6.8 Text Analysis and Computational Semiotics/Semantics 6.9 Machine Learning 7 Conclusions and Outlook References Index