Promises, Unpredictability, and Artificial Positivities:

Modes of Existence of Certain Chemical Entities

Abstract

The materials emerging from chemical laboratories are not fixed essences: they are hybrid entities—entwined with matter, technique, nature, and culture—whose properties are actualized as they circulate through diverse ecologies.  From this understanding, we propose a relational philosophical framework to elucidate three conceptual operators that facilitate the comprehension of their modes of existence. First, the “economy of promises”: regimes of expectations that drive investments, shape markets, and imaginaries, and often eclipse environmental and social costs. Secondly, “unpredictability”: unanticipated effects that emerge when molecules move between contexts. Thirdly, “artificial positivity”: the capillarization of psychotropics as they move from therapeutic niches to performance-enhancing instruments, establishing chemically modulated forms of life. From these three operators, we derive essential normative criteria to prevent and counteract certain opaque and deleterious modes of existence of specific material entities produced by the chemical industry. Through this relational perspective, we seek to shift the focus from “what is” to “what might come to be” and “at what cost”; the philosophy of chemistry thereby reinserts into public debate dimensions often absent from purely descriptive or functionalist analyses of chemical entities.