Abstract
Broadly speaking, this paper shows how the interaction between scientific practices may be subject to strategic constraints—that is, fruitful interaction between practices may require finding ways to adapt one practice to the strategies informing the other. One way, therefore, that the concepts within an interfield theory develop is by recrafting concepts originating in one practice in terms compatible with the strategies guiding the other. This sort of conceptual accommodation is often a prerequisite to fruitful interactions between practices initially directed toward different sorts of aims. I explore these general themes by considering both the strategic constraints operative in the interfield theory of quantum chemistry as well as the conceptual accommodation directed to meet them. To accomplish this, the paper supplies an account of the constraints put on the explanatory concepts of organic chemistry by the aims that have shaped the field. Because of the guiding interest in synthesis, I argue, the explanatory concepts of organic chemistry support a compositional strategy. This is how they manage to be outward-looking and thereby facilitate the reasoning by structural analogy crucial to crafting plausible syntheses of novel compounds. What makes a concept or classification “adequate or suitable” for use in organic chemistry is, therefore, its compatibility with the compositional strategy adopted by the discipline. Because quantum mechanics is responsive to different interests, quantum chemists have had to find ways to recreate this compositionality within their own framework in order to become broadly useful in support of organic chemistry. Orbital diagrams, for example, have been a useful tool for organic chemists at least in part because they are compatible with this compositional strategy. Several other ways of ensuring compatibility with compositionality that do not rely on diagrams or spatial representations have also been employed by quantum chemists. For instance, by introducing ‘localizing assumptions’ or using an ‘independent particle model’ quantum chemists have found ways to build their representation of a molecule out of pieces that can potentially recur in descriptions of distinct chemical structures. This allows insights generated in the account of one molecule to be potentially applicable to a class of other structures that contain some of the same structural components. In this way, quantum chemistry can potentially contribute to the project of understanding novel molecules in terms of structural analogies between their components and known compounds. I hope that by identifying compatibility with compositionality as the key feature of the explanatory concepts in organic chemistry, the strategic constraints operative within quantum chemistry can be brought to light. This in turn makes it possible to appreciate one significant form of conceptual accommodation that takes place in this interfield theory.
