Let us build better boats. An answer to Jeffrey Seeman's "Moving beyond insularity in the history, philosophy, and sociology of chemistry"

Abstract

In his recent Editorial Article, Seeman (2017) calls for the promotion of collaborative workamong diferent disciplines, focusing on the case of the interaction between chemistry, thehistory of chemistry and the philosophy of chemistry. From a general viewpoint, it is diffcultto disagree with this claim; moreover, the interest of scientists in the history and thephilosophy of science is always welcome. However, the devil is in the details: there areseveral points that, we think, must be discussed more carefully with the aim of arriving atfar-reaching conclusions.