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Class of 2023
Major
Chemistry
Philosophy
Mirabel Pond (she/her/hers) belongs to the Class of 2023 at St. Lawrence University. She is double majoring in Philosophy and Chemistry and plans to pursue philosophy in graduate school. She will continue this project as the subject of her senior honors thesis under the mentorship of Dr. Laura Rediehs.
Description

I propose that the practice of chemistry often reduces its subject matter into a vacuous form of itself; that we erroneously equate truth values assigned to states of matter with forms so mitigated or changed that they are no longer ontologically dependent on—nor can they feasibly describe—the original substance in question. During this fellowship, I examined objects in general and how their identities and demands on existence affect the types of ontological commitments we can justifiably devote ourselves to. I argue that the reduced representations we often assume objects to possess and their extended correlatives cannot be equivocated; therefore, they must function as independent entities in logical and explanatory structures. However, logical equivalence and sufficiency statements can be applied to abstraction principles in such a way that allows, in a sense, for the production of and interaction between objects while simultaneously preventing the necessity for change in abstracta.

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