What Is This Thing Called Science: An Assessment of the Nature and Status of Science and Its Methods

Abstract

This book is an introduction to philosophy of science and scientific method, which outlines the shortcomings of naive empiricist accounts of science, and describes and assesses modern attempts to replace them. There are reasons for doubting that facts acquired by observation and experiments are as straightforward and secure as has traditionally been assumed. Scientific knowledge can neither be conclusively proved nor conclusively disproved by reference to the facts. The great embarrassment in scientific theory is that the major advances in science have not been achieved in a way that the philosophy of science say they should have been. Chalmers point of departure is that philosophy of science is an effort to capture what is distinct and distinctly successful as a way of gaining knowledge. Chalmers begins with an examination of naive ideas of science based on simple empiricism, naive positivism, and induction. He shows these quickly and clearly to be misguided. This leads to a set of chapters investigating the idea that theory is the distinguishing feature of science. Chalmers has a nice set of chapters describing critically the approaches of Popper, Kuhn, and Lakatos, all of which are found to have some strengths. Chalmers is equally good on the defects of these approaches, all of which fail to capture crucial aspects of scientific knowledge and progress. A similar chapter is devoted to Paul Feyerabend's attack on scientific knowledge. Chalmers follows with chapters on other, recent approaches including Bayesian views and the new experimentalism. The latter does much better at describing progression of scientific knowledge. Chalmers then concludes with chapters on the nature of scientific laws and a sensible discussion of realism versus anti-realism. A consistent feature of this book is use of historical example, particularly from physics, to explore philosophical issues. – This book presents the chapters - Science and Knowledge Derived from the Facts of Experience; Observation as Practical Intervention; Experiment; Deriving Facts from Theories - Induction; Introducing Falsificationism; Sophisticated Falsificationism; Novel Predictions and the Growth of Knowledge; The Limitations of Falsificationism; Theories as Structures I - Kuhn’s Paradigms; Theories as Structures II; Research Programs; Feyerabend’s Anarchistic Theory of Science; Methodical Changes in Method; The Bayesian Approach; The New Experimentalism; Why Should the World Obey Laws?; Realism and Antirealism. – Bibliography p.149-153; Includes index. M.-M. V.

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