Professional Development Award in Science, Technology, and Society

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Professor Rice, a physical chemist, is undertaking a two year half-time study and research program in the history and philosophy of chemistry under Professor Noretta Koertge of Indiana University. He is undertaking a comparison of theories and mechanistic explanations for osmosis, both ordinary and anomalous, proposed by chemists, biologists, and physicists. Osmosis is a topic on which he has carried out scientific research and study. It represents a case study of considerable potential value to historians and philosophers of science. Under this grant, he will participate in graduate surveys and seminars in the history and philosophy of science and an organized reading program of basic and essential works in this area. While undertaking regular consultation with the faculty in history and philosophy of science at Indiana University, Professor Rice will be examining the history of osmosis with its competing theories. This history is fairly straightforward up to the time of van't Hoff who carried out a thermodynamic analysis of osmotic pressure on the basis of the analogy between dilute solutions and gases. At this point, however, chemists lost interest in mechanistic descriptions of osmosis, although physiologists have maintained their interest and a lively discussion of rival interpretations. Some of these physiologists advocate the tensile solvent theory, which appears to eliminate the need for the concept of activity in thermodynamics. An interest in so-called anomalous osmosis, which includes electrostatic interactions between charged membranes and the ions in solution, developed in the early 1900s and still occupies the time of both chemists and biologists. Professor Rice's goal is to investigate approaches, questions, beliefs and acceptable answers, models and theories of scientists from different disciplines or paradigms studying the same phenomena by comparing (1) the historical development of the pertinent thematic content of different paradigms,(2) the semantic or linguistic differences in the languages developed by different paradigms to discuss the same phenomena, and (3) the epistemological differences in acceptable answers to similar questions.