Chapter 8: Chemical Meta-concepts: Imagining the Relationships Between Chemical Concepts

Concepts do not only refer to things that we imagine to exist in the material world, as we also form concepts relating to our abstractions themselves (concepts related not to things and events, but to other concepts). We describe the world using notions such as laws and principles. These are not things considered to exist in the environment, but abstractions such as perceived relationships between different concepts that themselves reflect types of thing that are considered to exist. Similarly, when we form a model, this is a deliberate abstraction made through reflection on our concepts (i.e., abstractions of kinds of things and events). We develop theories, well-established sets of ideas positing relationships between different concepts that can be used as the basis of explanations and predictions. Theories not only relate concepts to each other, but may include specific laws and/or models. We form concepts of these conceptual-associations themselves (concepts of the laws, principles, models and theories) and the resulting meta-concepts are only considered canonical when they adopt canonical versions of the component concepts, related in the appropriate ways, and when the class of meta-concept (e.g., the nature of a scientific model) is itself well understood.