Reconsidering Explanation: Lessons from Nanosynthesis

Nanosynthesis forces a reevaluation of received views on scientific explanation. I discuss the synthesis of anisotropic metal nanoparticles, a typical nanosynthesis research program, in order to demonstrate the failure of standard philosophical accounts of explanation to capture the dynamics of information exchange in synthetic sciences. I argue that using the language of effective heuristics, coupled with attention to changes in the meanings of concepts across different length scales, is a more promising means of capturing how information is obtained from the study of nanosynthesis systems. This text is the script of the talk presented at the 2012 PSA meeting. Explanation is a classic topic in philosophy of science, and for good reason. But little has been said about explanation when the aim of a scientific practice is production or synthesis—making something—rather than describing. Disciplines like chemistry, materials science, and nanosynthesis, which I will call the synthetic sciences, are interested in accomplishing different kinds of tasks than disciplines like theoretical physics and biology. The aim of these disciplines is to make new substances and materials and to obtain scientific understanding through the process of production rather than observation or classification of pre-existing natural systems. And these disciplines aim to answer different kinds of questions to obtain scientific understanding; rather than answering questions about why something happens, the questions that the synthetic sciences aim to answer are more often questions about how to produce a new substance or material or why changing a procedure results in an altered product. Most theories of explanation, whether they are deductive-nomological, unificationist, causal-mechanical, or pragmatic, have not addressed the role of explanation in the synthetic sciences. And it seems remiss that philosophers have failed to account for explanation in chemistry, one of the big-three natural sciences, which is supported by some of the largest scientific societies in the world. Articles made up of descriptions of synthetic procedures, and discussions of how these procedures produce new substances and materials with new and interesting properties, occupy the bulk of most chemical