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What Is This Thing Called Science?
This indispensable new edition brings Chalmers' popular text up to date with contemporary trends and confirms its status as the best introductory textbook on the philosophy of science.
Over the last 25 years this account to dethrone empiricist thought has become both a bestseller and a standard university text with translations into fifteen languages.
This revised and extended edition offers a concise and illuminating treatment of major developments in the field over the last two decades, with the same accessible style which ensured the popularity of previous editions. Of particular importance is the examination of Bayesianism and the new experimentalism, as well as new chapters on the nature of scientific laws and recent trends in the realism versus anti-realism debate.
Over the last 25 years this account to dethrone empiricist thought has become both a bestseller and a standard university text with translations into fifteen languages.
This revised and extended edition offers a concise and illuminating treatment of major developments in the field over the last two decades, with the same accessible style which ensured the popularity of previous editions. Of particular importance is the examination of Bayesianism and the new experimentalism, as well as new chapters on the nature of scientific laws and recent trends in the realism versus anti-realism debate.
"Crisp, lucid and studded with telling examples… As a handy guide to recent alarums and excursions (in the philosophy of science) I find this book vigorous, gallant and useful."
New Scientist
266 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
324 people are currently reading
3328 people want to read
About the author
Alan F. Chalmers
14 books27 followersDr. Alan Chalmers was born in Bristol, UK in 1939. Despite beginning his academic career in Physics, Chalmers is best known for his work on the subject of the Philosophy of Science. He is most noted for his best-selling book "What Is This Thing Called Science?"
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July 6, 2015
You may be familiar with the quote from Richard Feynman, ‘philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds’. This is entirely correct if understood sufficiently pedantically. Ornithology is of no use to birds, as birds; but birds are part of a larger world in which they are subject to forces outside their control. The actions of humans, an important part of the world birds live in, are informed to an extent by ornithology. Good ornithology will suggest, inter alia, that the interests of birds will be served by preserving wetlands, reducing speed limits, restricting the proliferation of feral cats, and not splashing DDT around willy-nilly. Bad ornithology (based on propositions such that birds are spontaneously generated in clouds, hibernate under the ocean, or gather in piranha-like packs to take down large predators when humans are not watching) will lead to worse outcomes for birds.
In the same way, philosophy of science is useful to scientists if it encourages policy that is good for scientists. What we are looking for in a philosophy of science is that it encourage governments, industry, and the community at large to throw large sums of money at us but otherwise leave us alone. No, strike that. What we are actually looking for in a philosophy of science is something that accurately reflects what we do and communicates it clearly to the community so that they can make informed judgments about what is and what is not good scienceand throw large sums of money at those of us, like me, who are doing good science.
Is this book ‘good’ philosophy of science, by this criterion?
It is not quite as bad philosophy of science as this illustration of barnacle geese is bad ornithology. But it is not particularly good. And it is worrying that it could be adopted as a textbook. It is very worrying that it could be described as the ‘best introductory textbook on the philosophy of science’ on the back cover of the text edition.
There are two main problems with the philosophy of science in this book.
(1) Chalmers perpetuates the misconception that there is something special about science and its methods, some esoteric process or procedure only available to the highly-educated elite. At the end of the introduction, he states that his goal is to ‘give an account of science that captures its distinctive and special features’. This dichotomy between science and scientia, knowledge, is a false one. All knowledge that is real knowledge is derived through the scientific method.
In a quote attributed to Max Planck that should be carved on the mountain at the world’s end in letters as deep as a spear is long: Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.
Experiments are how we know that rice is edible and rain is wet and that these other bipeds are sentient creatures like us: these are inferences we have made non-verbally and confirmed through experiments we carried out when we were very young. They are theories that cannot be conclusively proved and disproved. They are no different in essence from the kinds of inferences and confirmatory experiments that are done by casts of thousands at the Large Hadron Collider. All knowledge is obtained in the same manner. It is the same thing. A philosophy that capitalises Science and sets it apart from scientia as something distinctive and special is pernicious. That is my first quarrel with Chalmers.
(2) You may recognise my statement that all real knowledge is derived through experiment as a restatement of the core of the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, the one American philosopher who could sing outdoors. He was also a practicing scientist: he graduated summa cum laude in chemistry from Harvard. The philosophy he founded is one you may have heard of: ‘pragmatism’. He wrote a great essay, ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’. If you want your ideas to be clear, you should read it.
In case it isn’t already obvious, I am a big Peirce fanboi.
The first thing I did when I picked up the Kindle Edition of Chalmers’ book was search for his name. It wasn’t there. It’s not in the index of the dead-tree edition I got out of the library. I looked up ‘pragmatism’, too. It wasn’t there. I looked up Peirce’s arguably more famous successors on the pragmatist road, William James and John Dewey. They weren’t there either. No, in Chapter 1 this book jumps from classical empiricists like Locke and Hume to the logical positivists in Vienna as if there was no such continent as North America and no such time as the 19th century.
Of course you are free to write a book on the philosophy of science and leave pragmatism out. You could write a book called ‘What is this thing called the Sky?’ and leave out the word ‘blue’. But if your book about the philosophy of science is intended to be (in the first sentence of the preface to the first edition) ‘a simple, clear, and elementary introduction to modern views about the nature of science’ and leaves out such an important view which (IMHO) strongly influences the understanding of many modern scientists, then one of two things is true: either you are sloppy, or you are pushing a barrow and your true intention is not to introduce ‘modern views’ but ‘one modern view’. That is my second quarrel with Chalmers.
These two problems – the perpetuation of the division between Science and scientia and the careless or willful neglect of pragmatism – severely impair the clarity and utility of the first four chapters of Chalmers’ work, where he addresses the nature of ‘facts’ and how scientists know them, and how laws and theories are derived from these facts.
Chalmers devotes much of Chapter 3, titled ‘Experiment’, to a rather muddled attempt to separate ‘facts’ from ‘relevant facts’. Chalmers says: ‘if there are facts that constitute the basis for science, than those facts come in the form of experimental results rather than any old observable facts’. Well, no. All the facts are the basis of science. The length of hair of youths in Sydney, the colour of your neighbour’s car, the number of books in your office; they are all relevant. If you want to reaffirm something you know, if you want to point to something as an example to support scientia, settled science, or whatever you want to call it, there is a vast amount of easily accessible material that is relevant.
Only if you want to extend knowledge in some particular direction might there be a need for you to devise a complicated experiment. What you have done is look at the facts you already know, or think you know, and the theoretical framework you use to structure them, and you have come up with an idea, A. You have computed the consequences of idea A, and one of them is B. So you are collecting facts to find out whether or not B seems to occur. This might be very hard. But, you are not tied to that particular experiment; you might be able to think of a better experiment that could test the same hypothesis you have thought of in some different way. C, D, E, F, G, and H might also be consequences of A. Tomorrow someone might invent a technique that makes it dead easy to determine G. This ‘computing the consequences of an idea’ is the soul of science, and it is something that is largely missing from Chalmers’ book.
When Chalmers says that ‘measuring the ozone concentration at various locations in the atmosphere yields relevant facts, whereas measuring the average hair length of youths in Sydney does not’, he is signalling another serious defect of this book. It is very, very, very physics-centric. If I am a sociologist, applying the scientific method, there are a lot of relevant facts I can learn by measuring the hair length of youths in Sydney. I can test the proposition that changes in hair-length are correlated to changes in voting behaviour in that demographic, with a shift to shorter hair possibly foreshadowing a swing to the Liberal party. I can look for annual trends: does hair length peak during the winter, when it is colder, or in the summer, when youths are most likely to take long holidays? I can couple my measurements with a traditional social-sciences survey instrument and see how well facial hair length correlates with social phenomena such as hipsterism or conservative Islam; can I use it as a proxy to map the spatial and temporal variation in these trends? I am sure there are enough relevant research questions there to support a whole Sydney Journal of Adolescent Capillometry. Such research questions, which are perfectly scientific, are ignored in this book.
Of more concern to me as a hard scientist concerned with public policy is the neglect of the historical sciences. With the significant exception of astronomy, the distinctive problems and challenges of the sciences where ‘experiments’, as normally defined, cannot be done, are not touched upon. And these are the sciences where science is most often embroiled in controversy and one side or the other (or both) want to harness the authority of science to support their view. We can’t do an experiment to show a population of fish evolving into amphibians, as such. What allows us to argue confidently that it happened? We can’t do an experiment on a statistically valid sample of planets to see the effects of increasing the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. What allows us to say anthropogenic global warming is scientific? The challenge of any philosophy of science today lies solidly in this area of the historical sciences. And... I’ll return to that point later.
Chalmers makes three statements concerning ‘facts’ that he says are the basis of science in the ‘common view’. These are:
(a) Facts are directly given to careful, unprejudiced observers via the senses
(b) Facts are prior to and independent of theory
(c) Facts constitute a firm and reliable foundation for scientific knowledge
Reading as a pragmatist, all of these are naive. Peirce unequivocally rejects the concept that facts are directly given to the senses; we infer ‘the facts’, as I have said above. And while the realities corresponding to ‘facts’ are certainly prior to and independent of theory, the ‘facts’ as we signify them are irreversibly entangled in theory. And, there is no certain firm and reliable foundation for knowledge: we can hope to asymptote towards knowledge which is of more and more utility, reaching truth if this process is infinitely prolonged, but we can never know for certain that our foundation is firm and reliable. The ‘orthodox philosophy’ of science Chalmers posits in these chapters is a straw man among the straw men, a Prince of the straw people.
In Chapter 4, Chalmers gets into another muddle in discussing induction. How is the principle of induction to be validated? There are two possibilities, he says, by logic and by experience. He rejects the appeal to logic, but instead of addressing the appeal to experience he reformulates it as an appeal to logic , making the following self-evidently ridiculous syllogism for us to mock:
(a) The principle of induction worked successfully on occasion x1
(b)The principle of induction worked successfully on occasion x2
Therefore: The principle of induction always works
We are not looking for a proof that the principle of induction always works. The appeal to evidence is a pragmatic one. Let’s say I want to land a probe on a comet. Let’s say I want to cure patient X’s lymphoma. How do I go about doing these things? By following laws determined inductively. I can never know, and I will never care, whether these laws are always true. It is the practical success of the laws in producing useful outcomes that I care about. If I land on the comet, if I cure the cancer, I am happy. The criterion of whether a scientific explanation should be accepted is its utility. Can it explain more than other explanations? Can it be applied to more circumstances? Will its application mean that fewer airplanes drop out of the sky, fewer babies are born with spina bifida, less energy is needed to run a desalination plant? The more our model of the universe approximates to the true nature of the universe, the more we will be able to do with it. This is how we can answer a question Chalmers poses halfway through the book: ‘If Newton changed scientific standards for the better, then one can ask ‘with respect to what standard was the change progressive?’ The answer is that we can do more stuff with Newton’s standards than Aristotle’s. This pragmatic criterion defines the scientific method in a way capable of judging sciences of all kinds, past, present, and future.
‘Think of the worm Bilharzia, which is one of the plagues of Egypt. It bores its way into the urinary bladder or the rectum, and there often sets up a peculiarly unpleasant form of cancer. For thousands of years men and women had prayed to Osiris, to Jesus, and to Allah, for deliverance from this agony. Bilharzia carried on. In 1917 Christopherson discovered that this disease, provided cancer had not developed, can invariably be cured with antimony tartrate.’ – J. B. S. Haldane
Chalmers’ chapters recapitulating the work of Popper, Kuhn, and Lakatos seemed to me to be goods as advertised: ‘a simple, clear, and elementary introduction to modern views about the nature of science’.
His chapter on Feyerabend does not make it clear enough that Feyerabend is a dangerous dickhead. Science, properly understood, is the radically democratic form of knowledge. It is a method open to everyone, which points however imperfectly to a world which is outside human will and whims. The Feyerabent alternative that individuals should be free to believe whatever they damn well please leads, if you think about it for more than an instant, to the outcome that individuals are constrained to believe (or act as if they believe) according to the will and whims of whoever is in charge. Without a commitment to some source of knowledge outside of society, society is a merciless tyrant. Everywhere and always where we do not have scientific arguments, we have arguments from authority: the ruthless, irrational, and implacable crushing of the individual by the Party, the Church, or the twitterati.
Chapter 12, on the Bayesian approach, seemed to be an unduly murky illustration of a simple truth: that all empirical reasoning is probabilistic. One of the great realisations of science has been that natural laws, and the phenomena they describe, are also (probably) probabilistic. I can recommend Eddington’s ‘The Nature of Physical Law’ for an exposition of this much better than any I could give.
I kept hoping to find something about the historical sciences, but there was only something called ‘the new experimentalism’, which seemed to have no point, ‘why should the world obey laws?’ which did, but should have been the second or third chapter in the book, and ‘realism and anti-realism’, which was a murky swamp of pointless arguments. Of course we cannot really know whether the picture of something given to us by science is true or not! But of course it is stupid to pretend that we are not getting a picture, through a glass darkly, of some reality that, as Hesse says, ‘tediously enough, is always there’. But I had no luck with the historical sciences.
There are two great principles that animate work in the historical sciences, and with reference to these it becomes obvious why the Copernican picture won out over the Ptolemaic picture, something that is discussed at length is this book. The first is uniformitarianism: if we can explain something distant in space or time from us in terms of the same laws we can see operating here and now, we prefer doing that; this allows us to ground our explanations of those distant things in the experiments we have done. Discarding a principle that different laws applied in the heavens and here on Earth was not justified by any astounding new observation: it was just something that was attractive to do because it converted a system that we could never hope to measure or understand into something that we could approach using the knowledge at our disposal.
We don’t know that uniformitarianism is true; it is just an assumption that seems to have held up pretty well so far. We have made it because it was the simplest assumption we could make. Because the second principle of the historical sciences is simplicity: an explanation should be as simply as possible, but no simpler. Copernicus’ model was conceptually simpler than Ptolemy’s, and a simple predictive model is better than a complicated one. The notion that all life on Earth evolved from a common ancestor by a process of natural selection is simpler than the notion that for billions of years Earth has been watched over by Cephalopod Overminds who duck down every so often to zap organisms with their Mutato-RayTM as part of some grand plan. We don’t really have any solid evidence one way or another: but we go with the simpler idea, until someone comes up with good evidence that our models needs to be more complicated.
Oh, there is more I could say. Much more. I have pages and pages of notes on this book that I haven’t touched yet. But I am tired now.
I will just end on a positive note, by repeating what I wrote when I recorded my first fugitive impressions of the book. In the Epilogue I was pleasantly surprised to find that Chalmers' conclusions map almost exactly on to what I believe. Science is an activity that asymptotes towards a valid map of the behaviour of observable phenomena, which are necessarily a subset of all-that-is, and can never give us a picture of the ultimate reality. But really – he would have gotten there lot more quickly and readably if he’d started off with Peirce’s ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’.
In the same way, philosophy of science is useful to scientists if it encourages policy that is good for scientists. What we are looking for in a philosophy of science is that it encourage governments, industry, and the community at large to throw large sums of money at us but otherwise leave us alone. No, strike that. What we are actually looking for in a philosophy of science is something that accurately reflects what we do and communicates it clearly to the community so that they can make informed judgments about what is and what is not good science
Is this book ‘good’ philosophy of science, by this criterion?
It is not quite as bad philosophy of science as this illustration of barnacle geese is bad ornithology. But it is not particularly good. And it is worrying that it could be adopted as a textbook. It is very worrying that it could be described as the ‘best introductory textbook on the philosophy of science’ on the back cover of the text edition.
There are two main problems with the philosophy of science in this book.
(1) Chalmers perpetuates the misconception that there is something special about science and its methods, some esoteric process or procedure only available to the highly-educated elite. At the end of the introduction, he states that his goal is to ‘give an account of science that captures its distinctive and special features’. This dichotomy between science and scientia, knowledge, is a false one. All knowledge that is real knowledge is derived through the scientific method.
In a quote attributed to Max Planck that should be carved on the mountain at the world’s end in letters as deep as a spear is long: Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.
Experiments are how we know that rice is edible and rain is wet and that these other bipeds are sentient creatures like us: these are inferences we have made non-verbally and confirmed through experiments we carried out when we were very young. They are theories that cannot be conclusively proved and disproved. They are no different in essence from the kinds of inferences and confirmatory experiments that are done by casts of thousands at the Large Hadron Collider. All knowledge is obtained in the same manner. It is the same thing. A philosophy that capitalises Science and sets it apart from scientia as something distinctive and special is pernicious. That is my first quarrel with Chalmers.
(2) You may recognise my statement that all real knowledge is derived through experiment as a restatement of the core of the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, the one American philosopher who could sing outdoors. He was also a practicing scientist: he graduated summa cum laude in chemistry from Harvard. The philosophy he founded is one you may have heard of: ‘pragmatism’. He wrote a great essay, ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’. If you want your ideas to be clear, you should read it.
In case it isn’t already obvious, I am a big Peirce fanboi.
The first thing I did when I picked up the Kindle Edition of Chalmers’ book was search for his name. It wasn’t there. It’s not in the index of the dead-tree edition I got out of the library. I looked up ‘pragmatism’, too. It wasn’t there. I looked up Peirce’s arguably more famous successors on the pragmatist road, William James and John Dewey. They weren’t there either. No, in Chapter 1 this book jumps from classical empiricists like Locke and Hume to the logical positivists in Vienna as if there was no such continent as North America and no such time as the 19th century.
Of course you are free to write a book on the philosophy of science and leave pragmatism out. You could write a book called ‘What is this thing called the Sky?’ and leave out the word ‘blue’. But if your book about the philosophy of science is intended to be (in the first sentence of the preface to the first edition) ‘a simple, clear, and elementary introduction to modern views about the nature of science’ and leaves out such an important view which (IMHO) strongly influences the understanding of many modern scientists, then one of two things is true: either you are sloppy, or you are pushing a barrow and your true intention is not to introduce ‘modern views’ but ‘one modern view’. That is my second quarrel with Chalmers.
These two problems – the perpetuation of the division between Science and scientia and the careless or willful neglect of pragmatism – severely impair the clarity and utility of the first four chapters of Chalmers’ work, where he addresses the nature of ‘facts’ and how scientists know them, and how laws and theories are derived from these facts.
Chalmers devotes much of Chapter 3, titled ‘Experiment’, to a rather muddled attempt to separate ‘facts’ from ‘relevant facts’. Chalmers says: ‘if there are facts that constitute the basis for science, than those facts come in the form of experimental results rather than any old observable facts’. Well, no. All the facts are the basis of science. The length of hair of youths in Sydney, the colour of your neighbour’s car, the number of books in your office; they are all relevant. If you want to reaffirm something you know, if you want to point to something as an example to support scientia, settled science, or whatever you want to call it, there is a vast amount of easily accessible material that is relevant.
Only if you want to extend knowledge in some particular direction might there be a need for you to devise a complicated experiment. What you have done is look at the facts you already know, or think you know, and the theoretical framework you use to structure them, and you have come up with an idea, A. You have computed the consequences of idea A, and one of them is B. So you are collecting facts to find out whether or not B seems to occur. This might be very hard. But, you are not tied to that particular experiment; you might be able to think of a better experiment that could test the same hypothesis you have thought of in some different way. C, D, E, F, G, and H might also be consequences of A. Tomorrow someone might invent a technique that makes it dead easy to determine G. This ‘computing the consequences of an idea’ is the soul of science, and it is something that is largely missing from Chalmers’ book.
When Chalmers says that ‘measuring the ozone concentration at various locations in the atmosphere yields relevant facts, whereas measuring the average hair length of youths in Sydney does not’, he is signalling another serious defect of this book. It is very, very, very physics-centric. If I am a sociologist, applying the scientific method, there are a lot of relevant facts I can learn by measuring the hair length of youths in Sydney. I can test the proposition that changes in hair-length are correlated to changes in voting behaviour in that demographic, with a shift to shorter hair possibly foreshadowing a swing to the Liberal party. I can look for annual trends: does hair length peak during the winter, when it is colder, or in the summer, when youths are most likely to take long holidays? I can couple my measurements with a traditional social-sciences survey instrument and see how well facial hair length correlates with social phenomena such as hipsterism or conservative Islam; can I use it as a proxy to map the spatial and temporal variation in these trends? I am sure there are enough relevant research questions there to support a whole Sydney Journal of Adolescent Capillometry. Such research questions, which are perfectly scientific, are ignored in this book.
Of more concern to me as a hard scientist concerned with public policy is the neglect of the historical sciences. With the significant exception of astronomy, the distinctive problems and challenges of the sciences where ‘experiments’, as normally defined, cannot be done, are not touched upon. And these are the sciences where science is most often embroiled in controversy and one side or the other (or both) want to harness the authority of science to support their view. We can’t do an experiment to show a population of fish evolving into amphibians, as such. What allows us to argue confidently that it happened? We can’t do an experiment on a statistically valid sample of planets to see the effects of increasing the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. What allows us to say anthropogenic global warming is scientific? The challenge of any philosophy of science today lies solidly in this area of the historical sciences. And... I’ll return to that point later.
Chalmers makes three statements concerning ‘facts’ that he says are the basis of science in the ‘common view’. These are:
(a) Facts are directly given to careful, unprejudiced observers via the senses
(b) Facts are prior to and independent of theory
(c) Facts constitute a firm and reliable foundation for scientific knowledge
Reading as a pragmatist, all of these are naive. Peirce unequivocally rejects the concept that facts are directly given to the senses; we infer ‘the facts’, as I have said above. And while the realities corresponding to ‘facts’ are certainly prior to and independent of theory, the ‘facts’ as we signify them are irreversibly entangled in theory. And, there is no certain firm and reliable foundation for knowledge: we can hope to asymptote towards knowledge which is of more and more utility, reaching truth if this process is infinitely prolonged, but we can never know for certain that our foundation is firm and reliable. The ‘orthodox philosophy’ of science Chalmers posits in these chapters is a straw man among the straw men, a Prince of the straw people.
In Chapter 4, Chalmers gets into another muddle in discussing induction. How is the principle of induction to be validated? There are two possibilities, he says, by logic and by experience. He rejects the appeal to logic, but instead of addressing the appeal to experience he reformulates it as an appeal to logic , making the following self-evidently ridiculous syllogism for us to mock:
(a) The principle of induction worked successfully on occasion x1
(b)The principle of induction worked successfully on occasion x2
Therefore: The principle of induction always works
We are not looking for a proof that the principle of induction always works. The appeal to evidence is a pragmatic one. Let’s say I want to land a probe on a comet. Let’s say I want to cure patient X’s lymphoma. How do I go about doing these things? By following laws determined inductively. I can never know, and I will never care, whether these laws are always true. It is the practical success of the laws in producing useful outcomes that I care about. If I land on the comet, if I cure the cancer, I am happy. The criterion of whether a scientific explanation should be accepted is its utility. Can it explain more than other explanations? Can it be applied to more circumstances? Will its application mean that fewer airplanes drop out of the sky, fewer babies are born with spina bifida, less energy is needed to run a desalination plant? The more our model of the universe approximates to the true nature of the universe, the more we will be able to do with it. This is how we can answer a question Chalmers poses halfway through the book: ‘If Newton changed scientific standards for the better, then one can ask ‘with respect to what standard was the change progressive?’ The answer is that we can do more stuff with Newton’s standards than Aristotle’s. This pragmatic criterion defines the scientific method in a way capable of judging sciences of all kinds, past, present, and future.
‘Think of the worm Bilharzia, which is one of the plagues of Egypt. It bores its way into the urinary bladder or the rectum, and there often sets up a peculiarly unpleasant form of cancer. For thousands of years men and women had prayed to Osiris, to Jesus, and to Allah, for deliverance from this agony. Bilharzia carried on. In 1917 Christopherson discovered that this disease, provided cancer had not developed, can invariably be cured with antimony tartrate.’ – J. B. S. Haldane
Chalmers’ chapters recapitulating the work of Popper, Kuhn, and Lakatos seemed to me to be goods as advertised: ‘a simple, clear, and elementary introduction to modern views about the nature of science’.
His chapter on Feyerabend does not make it clear enough that Feyerabend is a dangerous dickhead. Science, properly understood, is the radically democratic form of knowledge. It is a method open to everyone, which points however imperfectly to a world which is outside human will and whims. The Feyerabent alternative that individuals should be free to believe whatever they damn well please leads, if you think about it for more than an instant, to the outcome that individuals are constrained to believe (or act as if they believe) according to the will and whims of whoever is in charge. Without a commitment to some source of knowledge outside of society, society is a merciless tyrant. Everywhere and always where we do not have scientific arguments, we have arguments from authority: the ruthless, irrational, and implacable crushing of the individual by the Party, the Church, or the twitterati.
Chapter 12, on the Bayesian approach, seemed to be an unduly murky illustration of a simple truth: that all empirical reasoning is probabilistic. One of the great realisations of science has been that natural laws, and the phenomena they describe, are also (probably) probabilistic. I can recommend Eddington’s ‘The Nature of Physical Law’ for an exposition of this much better than any I could give.
I kept hoping to find something about the historical sciences, but there was only something called ‘the new experimentalism’, which seemed to have no point, ‘why should the world obey laws?’ which did, but should have been the second or third chapter in the book, and ‘realism and anti-realism’, which was a murky swamp of pointless arguments. Of course we cannot really know whether the picture of something given to us by science is true or not! But of course it is stupid to pretend that we are not getting a picture, through a glass darkly, of some reality that, as Hesse says, ‘tediously enough, is always there’. But I had no luck with the historical sciences.
There are two great principles that animate work in the historical sciences, and with reference to these it becomes obvious why the Copernican picture won out over the Ptolemaic picture, something that is discussed at length is this book. The first is uniformitarianism: if we can explain something distant in space or time from us in terms of the same laws we can see operating here and now, we prefer doing that; this allows us to ground our explanations of those distant things in the experiments we have done. Discarding a principle that different laws applied in the heavens and here on Earth was not justified by any astounding new observation: it was just something that was attractive to do because it converted a system that we could never hope to measure or understand into something that we could approach using the knowledge at our disposal.
We don’t know that uniformitarianism is true; it is just an assumption that seems to have held up pretty well so far. We have made it because it was the simplest assumption we could make. Because the second principle of the historical sciences is simplicity: an explanation should be as simply as possible, but no simpler. Copernicus’ model was conceptually simpler than Ptolemy’s, and a simple predictive model is better than a complicated one. The notion that all life on Earth evolved from a common ancestor by a process of natural selection is simpler than the notion that for billions of years Earth has been watched over by Cephalopod Overminds who duck down every so often to zap organisms with their Mutato-RayTM as part of some grand plan. We don’t really have any solid evidence one way or another: but we go with the simpler idea, until someone comes up with good evidence that our models needs to be more complicated.
Oh, there is more I could say. Much more. I have pages and pages of notes on this book that I haven’t touched yet. But I am tired now.
I will just end on a positive note, by repeating what I wrote when I recorded my first fugitive impressions of the book. In the Epilogue I was pleasantly surprised to find that Chalmers' conclusions map almost exactly on to what I believe. Science is an activity that asymptotes towards a valid map of the behaviour of observable phenomena, which are necessarily a subset of all-that-is, and can never give us a picture of the ultimate reality. But really – he would have gotten there lot more quickly and readably if he’d started off with Peirce’s ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’.
April 22, 2022
《چیستی علم》 کتابی است درباره فلسفه علم که با بیانی ساده و جذاب به نقد پارادایمهای مختلف در عرصه علم میپردازد. قسمت اول کتاب به معرفی و نقد استقراگرایی پرداخته شده است. استقراگرایان به اولویت "مشاهده بیطرفانه" بدون پشتوانه نظریهها معتقدند. اما چالمرز معتقد است که چنین مشاهده بیطرفانهای امکانپذیر نیست و حتی درک ما از سادهترین کلمات و مفاهیم بر پایه نظریهها و پیشزمینههای قبلی قرار دارد. در عین حال، چالمرز به وجود حقیقتی در بیرون از انسان و فارغ از برداشتهای او معتقد است. بخش دوم کتاب به نقد ابطالگرایی اختصاص دارد. از نظر ابطالگرایان هیچ نظریهای را نمیتوان تایید کرد، نظریهها صرفا صادقند تا زمانیکه گزارهای مشاهداتی مبنی بر رد و ابطال آنها یافت نشود. در حقیقت تاریخ علم از دیدگاه ابطالگرایان تاریخ ابطال نظریههاست. از نظر چالمرز اما، یک گزاره مشاهداتی که برای ابطال یک نظریه مورد استفاده قرار میگیرد، به اندازه گزارههای مشاهداتی استقراگرایان، میتواند تحت تاثیر نگاه و درک ناکامل انسانی قرار داشته باشد و در فاصله زیاد با حقیقت.
در نهایت چالمرز ایدههای خود را در رابطه با چیستی علم عنوان میکند که البته نه یک برنامه و روش برای استفاده دانشمندان، که یک تحلیل تاریخی است. چالمرز اگرچه معتقد است که هیچ تلقی ابدی و جهانشمولی از علم وجود ندارد، اما به گفته خودش به دنبال تعدیل رویکردهای افراطی فردگرایانه و نسبیگرایانه علیه ایدئولوژی علم است. از دیدگاه او نه تنها نمیتوان نوع خاصی از معرفت را صرفا به دلیل عدم تطابق با چیزی که به عنوان معرفت علمی شناخته میشود، به کلی طرد کرد، بلکه باید اهداف مورد نظر خود آن معرفت و شیوههای دستیابی به آنها و میزان نیل به موفقیت در دستیابی به همین اهداف را مورد نقد و بررسی قرار داد.
بیان کتاب بسیار ساده و روان است و با مثالهای بسیاری از تاریخ علم فیزیک همراه شده است که در عین حالت داستانگونه، درک برخی از مثالها شاید برای کسانی که سررشته زیادی از علم فیزیک ندارند، راحت نباشد که البته به نظر من این موضوع لطمهای به روند کلی مطالعه کتاب وارد نمیکند.
در نهایت چالمرز ایدههای خود را در رابطه با چیستی علم عنوان میکند که البته نه یک برنامه و روش برای استفاده دانشمندان، که یک تحلیل تاریخی است. چالمرز اگرچه معتقد است که هیچ تلقی ابدی و جهانشمولی از علم وجود ندارد، اما به گفته خودش به دنبال تعدیل رویکردهای افراطی فردگرایانه و نسبیگرایانه علیه ایدئولوژی علم است. از دیدگاه او نه تنها نمیتوان نوع خاصی از معرفت را صرفا به دلیل عدم تطابق با چیزی که به عنوان معرفت علمی شناخته میشود، به کلی طرد کرد، بلکه باید اهداف مورد نظر خود آن معرفت و شیوههای دستیابی به آنها و میزان نیل به موفقیت در دستیابی به همین اهداف را مورد نقد و بررسی قرار داد.
بیان کتاب بسیار ساده و روان است و با مثالهای بسیاری از تاریخ علم فیزیک همراه شده است که در عین حالت داستانگونه، درک برخی از مثالها شاید برای کسانی که سررشته زیادی از علم فیزیک ندارند، راحت نباشد که البته به نظر من این موضوع لطمهای به روند کلی مطالعه کتاب وارد نمیکند.
October 11, 2015
كتاب ظاهرا يكي از مهم ترين هاي فارسي در فلسفه علمه، من كه تا الان حداقل سه بار اين كتابو تو كلاس هاي مختلف امتحان دادم :\
نيمه اول كه بيشتر در مورد پوزيتيويسم و ابطال گرايي توضيح ميده به نظرم در كل خوبه اما نيمه دوم اگرچه من به شخصه انتقادات زيادي مي تونم بهش بكنم و نظر خود چالمرز رو هم نمي پذيرم و چندان نظريه چشمگيري نمي دونم، اما به نظرم در كل اين بخش ميتونه بينش هاي فلسفي خيلي جدي ودقيقي رو به خواننده نه چندان حرفه اي فلسفه علم بده.
به علاوه توضيحاتش در مورد فيزيك و علوم طبيعي براي من علوم انساني خوانده كه كمتر به اين مثال ها برمي خورم اگرچه كمي سخت بود ولي غنيمت بود. در كل نياز جدي دارم كه كمي رياضي و فيزيك ياد بگيرم!
نيمه اول كه بيشتر در مورد پوزيتيويسم و ابطال گرايي توضيح ميده به نظرم در كل خوبه اما نيمه دوم اگرچه من به شخصه انتقادات زيادي مي تونم بهش بكنم و نظر خود چالمرز رو هم نمي پذيرم و چندان نظريه چشمگيري نمي دونم، اما به نظرم در كل اين بخش ميتونه بينش هاي فلسفي خيلي جدي ودقيقي رو به خواننده نه چندان حرفه اي فلسفه علم بده.
به علاوه توضيحاتش در مورد فيزيك و علوم طبيعي براي من علوم انساني خوانده كه كمتر به اين مثال ها برمي خورم اگرچه كمي سخت بود ولي غنيمت بود. در كل نياز جدي دارم كه كمي رياضي و فيزيك ياد بگيرم!
April 25, 2019
گاهی نویسنده با شعفْ نظریات خودش را مطرح میکرد و آنها را جانشینی برای آرای معروف فلسفهی علم قرار میداد که تلاشی مضحک بود؛ صرفا حد وسط چند نظریه را گرفتن و بدون روششناسی خاصی، اهدافی را به آن نظریات ضمیمه کردن و جواب هیچ پرسشی را بهتر ندادن. بعد هم نویسنده از نظریاتش دفاع میکند که اگر میبینید مبهم است (و در واقع خودم هم نفهمیدمشان!) اما این حسنش است، چون هرچیزی که مبهم باشد پیشرفت میکند و نظریات قطعی پیشرفت نمیکنند. (لاالهالاالله!)
اما سوای از این موارد، این کتاب هم در کنار سایر کتبی قرار میگیرد که با زبان ساده، فلسفهی علم را تاریخی نقل میکنند و آموزش میدهند و طبعا خیلی چیزها را هم (از عمد یا دشواری مفاهیم یا ناتوانی از نقد) جامیاندازند.
ترجمهی سعید زیباکلام هم بنظرم اتفاقا باحال بود!
اما سوای از این موارد، این کتاب هم در کنار سایر کتبی قرار میگیرد که با زبان ساده، فلسفهی علم را تاریخی نقل میکنند و آموزش میدهند و طبعا خیلی چیزها را هم (از عمد یا دشواری مفاهیم یا ناتوانی از نقد) جامیاندازند.
ترجمهی سعید زیباکلام هم بنظرم اتفاقا باحال بود!
August 11, 2021
Εξαιρετικό βιβλίο, το οποίο κυρίως αναφέρεται στη φιλοσοφία της Επιστήμης. Περιγράφονται όλες οι τάσεις και οι εκπρόσωποί τους. Πρόκειται για ένα κλασικό βιβλίο, ιδιαίτερα ακαδημαϊκό βέβαια και όχι ελαφρύ.
February 6, 2021
'What is This Thing Called Science? by A. F. Chalmers basically discusses and examines every single known element which most civilizations believe makes up the class of interests and activities we name science. Like, what is a fact, what is an observation, how should an experiment be set up, how theories are derived from facts and vice versa, what is a workable theory, what are the types of theories and the operating rationales behind experiments, etc.
This is an introductory book describing what is the philosophy of science, so no worries, gentle reader. Chalmers is 'belling the cat' called Science, trying to make Science visible by outlining it's physiognomy, so to speak, for the 101 reader.
Is progress actually progress built on past discoveries or are new discoveries that change everything a brand new paradigm and a new starting point that throws all of the past science under a bus? Can we really know anything is real since our wetwork senses come between us and reality? It is a fact our wetwork senses have been wrong in what they perceive. Even scientists have been fooled by what they see, hear, feel, interpret. Experiments can be weirdly affected by a scientist's beliefs.
Chalmers asks the question is this or that element of science valid for science discoveries. Do they even exist outside of the individual mind? What invalidates each of the elements of science? For example, he proves how observations can be wrong since people cannot prove anything they see is:
-repeatable, i.e., do other people see Exactly what you see, for example, the color green is the same green color for all of us observing green color,
-culture, experience, education, age affects what people think they see, for example, x-rays look quite different in importance and meaning to a non-medical observer and an experienced doctor although both are looking at the same x-rays - not all scientists are working on the same stage of education, perception and knowledge,
-in each era technology has made observations of a thing more profoundly accurate which sometimes has had the effect of destroying what people thought they had correctly observed and built theories/science upon it, for example, that planets/stars in the sky were the same size and distance from Earth seen with the eye, but this was proved incorrect with the invention of the telescope, which changed everything people thought they knew, tossing out entire so-called discoveries and upending religions/societies/education/mentalities.
I took a class in philosophy 101, which really was a historical review of philosophy beginning with the ancient Greeks. Philosophy in its early explorations/inventions by ancient Greek polymaths and others who wrote these strange books in later centuries could be followed by ordinary educated people. But when twentieth century academics started refining the work of past philosophers I suspect they cooked their brain cells into burnt cinders and didn't know it. Today, philosophers expend all of their efforts on tweaking ordinary mental perceptions/descriptions of reality into abstractions, and then breaking those abstractions down into parts of an abstraction, and then into parts of the parts of the parts of abstractions, and then on and on down and down into the quarks, bosuns and gluons of a philosophical concept, so-to-speak. The acronyms and multi-syllabic hyphenated names of the ever-growing lists of philosophy-based mental-concept minutia that have been and are being developed in philosophy studies are mind boggling.
If you've ever taken an academic literary theory class and you thought that was totally demented, modern philosophical academics are absolutely lunatics. At least when mathematicians are going into the fourth and fifth dimensions of math where no one else can follow, they have results which can be, mostly, developed into real-world representations. Well, sometimes. Philosophy today (and literary theory) is primarily brain candy for academics and nothing else. If an ordinary person wants to read up on this stuff, I found such books at University bookstores as well as some libraries. It's interesting to peruse if you like twisting your mind into knots and giving yourself a headache for the rest of the day.
Frankly, the field of modern philosophy and those who are engaged in the thought experiments of modern philosophy are generally insane in my humble opinion, but 'What is This Thing Called Science' is written for the beginning student or general reader. It is an excellent introduction to the philosophy called the philosophy of science. I think. I haven't read any others. I haven't read Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which apparently is what compelled Chalmers to write this book.
The chapters discussing Bayes' theorum and some of those philosophers who are its proponents are out of their minds. Just saying. It is probability maths taken to extremes. Not that I know much of probability maths beyond 101 classes.
The book has Notes, Bibliography and Index sections. Each chapter lists a further reading section at the end of the chapter.
This is an introductory book describing what is the philosophy of science, so no worries, gentle reader. Chalmers is 'belling the cat' called Science, trying to make Science visible by outlining it's physiognomy, so to speak, for the 101 reader.
Is progress actually progress built on past discoveries or are new discoveries that change everything a brand new paradigm and a new starting point that throws all of the past science under a bus? Can we really know anything is real since our wetwork senses come between us and reality? It is a fact our wetwork senses have been wrong in what they perceive. Even scientists have been fooled by what they see, hear, feel, interpret. Experiments can be weirdly affected by a scientist's beliefs.
Chalmers asks the question is this or that element of science valid for science discoveries. Do they even exist outside of the individual mind? What invalidates each of the elements of science? For example, he proves how observations can be wrong since people cannot prove anything they see is:
-repeatable, i.e., do other people see Exactly what you see, for example, the color green is the same green color for all of us observing green color,
-culture, experience, education, age affects what people think they see, for example, x-rays look quite different in importance and meaning to a non-medical observer and an experienced doctor although both are looking at the same x-rays - not all scientists are working on the same stage of education, perception and knowledge,
-in each era technology has made observations of a thing more profoundly accurate which sometimes has had the effect of destroying what people thought they had correctly observed and built theories/science upon it, for example, that planets/stars in the sky were the same size and distance from Earth seen with the eye, but this was proved incorrect with the invention of the telescope, which changed everything people thought they knew, tossing out entire so-called discoveries and upending religions/societies/education/mentalities.
I took a class in philosophy 101, which really was a historical review of philosophy beginning with the ancient Greeks. Philosophy in its early explorations/inventions by ancient Greek polymaths and others who wrote these strange books in later centuries could be followed by ordinary educated people. But when twentieth century academics started refining the work of past philosophers I suspect they cooked their brain cells into burnt cinders and didn't know it. Today, philosophers expend all of their efforts on tweaking ordinary mental perceptions/descriptions of reality into abstractions, and then breaking those abstractions down into parts of an abstraction, and then into parts of the parts of the parts of abstractions, and then on and on down and down into the quarks, bosuns and gluons of a philosophical concept, so-to-speak. The acronyms and multi-syllabic hyphenated names of the ever-growing lists of philosophy-based mental-concept minutia that have been and are being developed in philosophy studies are mind boggling.
If you've ever taken an academic literary theory class and you thought that was totally demented, modern philosophical academics are absolutely lunatics. At least when mathematicians are going into the fourth and fifth dimensions of math where no one else can follow, they have results which can be, mostly, developed into real-world representations. Well, sometimes. Philosophy today (and literary theory) is primarily brain candy for academics and nothing else. If an ordinary person wants to read up on this stuff, I found such books at University bookstores as well as some libraries. It's interesting to peruse if you like twisting your mind into knots and giving yourself a headache for the rest of the day.
Frankly, the field of modern philosophy and those who are engaged in the thought experiments of modern philosophy are generally insane in my humble opinion, but 'What is This Thing Called Science' is written for the beginning student or general reader. It is an excellent introduction to the philosophy called the philosophy of science. I think. I haven't read any others. I haven't read Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which apparently is what compelled Chalmers to write this book.
The chapters discussing Bayes' theorum and some of those philosophers who are its proponents are out of their minds. Just saying. It is probability maths taken to extremes. Not that I know much of probability maths beyond 101 classes.
The book has Notes, Bibliography and Index sections. Each chapter lists a further reading section at the end of the chapter.
August 26, 2017
تفاوت فسلفه ی علم و چیستی علم را باید از متخصصین این عرصه جویا شد اما کتاب مورد نظر در هر یک از دو حوزه که باشد باز هم در تحقق رسالت خود بسیار موفق است و با ترجمه ی قابل قبول سعیدزیباکلام،خواننده پس از خواندن آن حس "بیشتر دانستن" را به شکل ملموسی دریافت خواهد کرد.کتاب سوال می پرسد،پاسخ هم میدهد اما باز هم خواننده را درگیر نگه می دارد.درگیر با پاسخ هایی که خود زاینده ی پرسش های دیگرند و این درگیری ادامه دار همان شیرینی شک است.شکی که به این سوال مهم آغاز می شود:
به راستی "علم" چیست؟
به راستی "علم" چیست؟
February 23, 2017
Leí gran parte de este libro en un curso de Epistemología de las Ciencias Naturales en la facultad. Ahora lo releo para ver si es un material adecuado para mis estudiantes de secundaria. es bastante completo y claro para mí y bastante esclarecedor en cuanto al enfoque bayesiano del cual sabía poco y nada. Algunas diferenciaciones y definiciones son muy útiles; pero igual creo que es un poco elevado y áspero para dárselo a mis estudiantes.
Puede ser útil como referencia, para elaborar mapas conceptuales o leer guiadamente. Lo recomiendo sólo para personas que ya saben algo del tema o estudiantes de nivel superior.
Puede ser útil como referencia, para elaborar mapas conceptuales o leer guiadamente. Lo recomiendo sólo para personas que ya saben algo del tema o estudiantes de nivel superior.
June 16, 2019
كتاب فوق العاده اى بود
و خب از طرفى با توجه به اينكه از منابع فلسفه علم كارشناسى و ارشد فلسفه هم هست كتاب نسبتا سنگينيه و متن ثقيلى داره
خيلى از جاها من خواننده با نويسنده موافق نبودم خصوصا جاهايى كه نظراى شخصى خودشو بيان ميكرد اما نقيصه و ايراد بزرگ كتاب ترجمه به شدت ضعيف و دم دستى جناب زيباكلام بود 😬😬
تا جايى كه جايى از كتاب بود كه ايشون درست متوجه نشدن و با راهنمايى دانشجوى "هوشمند"شون مطلب درست كتاب رو به غلط ويرايش كردن 😑
در كل اما براى من مطلب جالب و آموزنده خيلى زياد داشت
و خب از طرفى با توجه به اينكه از منابع فلسفه علم كارشناسى و ارشد فلسفه هم هست كتاب نسبتا سنگينيه و متن ثقيلى داره
خيلى از جاها من خواننده با نويسنده موافق نبودم خصوصا جاهايى كه نظراى شخصى خودشو بيان ميكرد اما نقيصه و ايراد بزرگ كتاب ترجمه به شدت ضعيف و دم دستى جناب زيباكلام بود 😬😬
تا جايى كه جايى از كتاب بود كه ايشون درست متوجه نشدن و با راهنمايى دانشجوى "هوشمند"شون مطلب درست كتاب رو به غلط ويرايش كردن 😑
در كل اما براى من مطلب جالب و آموزنده خيلى زياد داشت
January 18, 2020
¿Qué es esa cosa llamada ciencia? Es un libro introductorio a la filosofía de la ciencia; Comienza simplificando las dos posturas primordiales: el inductivismo y el falsacionismo. El inductivista ingenuo recopila una cantidad grande de observaciones en diversas condiciones para derivar leyes y teorías. Por ejemplo, tras realizar la observación de cien girasoles amarillos, puede concluir que todos los girasoles son amarillos. A partir de esto, puede predecir que, si siembra un girasol, su floración será amarilla. Aunque el inductivismo es útil, se enfrenta con varios problemas. Entre ellos, que nada nos asegura que el próximo girasol que plantemos no será azul.
La siguiente postura expuesta es el falsacionismo. El falsacionismo hace gala de la imaginación de los científicos para resolver un problema o explicar un hecho. El falsacionista realiza un supuesto al que llamamos hipótesis y se esfuerza en demostrar que es falso. Si a través de la experimentación el investigador descubre que su hipótesis es falsa, la rechaza. Esto no se considera un fracaso, las hipótesis falsadas también aportan al avance científico. En caso de que la hipótesis pase la prueba se dice que ha sido confirmada, esto no es sinónimo de que la hipótesis sea verdadera, ni siquiera probablemente verdadera. Las hipótesis que han sido confirmadas son las que explican de una mejor manera la naturaleza de los hechos. El falsacionista no afirma que una teoría es cierta, pero si puede afirmar que una teoría es falsa.
Después de refutar el inductivismo y el falsacionismo, Alan Chambers expone y rebate posturas más actuales como el relativismo, el individualismo, el realismo y el objetivismo. El libro se apoya enormemente en la historia de la física. Considero que cualquier estudiante de alguna carrera científica se beneficiará de su lectura y obtendrá una mayor comprensión de la labor que se propone a desempeñar.
Una de mis cosas favoritas de este libro, es el hecho de que el autor se mantiene muy imparcial con los temas que explica, y suele explorar posturas opuestas, distinguiéndolas claramente de su propia postura, lo cual incentiva al lector a apropiarse del conocimiento y llegar a conclusiones propias.
La siguiente postura expuesta es el falsacionismo. El falsacionismo hace gala de la imaginación de los científicos para resolver un problema o explicar un hecho. El falsacionista realiza un supuesto al que llamamos hipótesis y se esfuerza en demostrar que es falso. Si a través de la experimentación el investigador descubre que su hipótesis es falsa, la rechaza. Esto no se considera un fracaso, las hipótesis falsadas también aportan al avance científico. En caso de que la hipótesis pase la prueba se dice que ha sido confirmada, esto no es sinónimo de que la hipótesis sea verdadera, ni siquiera probablemente verdadera. Las hipótesis que han sido confirmadas son las que explican de una mejor manera la naturaleza de los hechos. El falsacionista no afirma que una teoría es cierta, pero si puede afirmar que una teoría es falsa.
Después de refutar el inductivismo y el falsacionismo, Alan Chambers expone y rebate posturas más actuales como el relativismo, el individualismo, el realismo y el objetivismo. El libro se apoya enormemente en la historia de la física. Considero que cualquier estudiante de alguna carrera científica se beneficiará de su lectura y obtendrá una mayor comprensión de la labor que se propone a desempeñar.
Una de mis cosas favoritas de este libro, es el hecho de que el autor se mantiene muy imparcial con los temas que explica, y suele explorar posturas opuestas, distinguiéndolas claramente de su propia postura, lo cual incentiva al lector a apropiarse del conocimiento y llegar a conclusiones propias.
February 13, 2017
با زجر خوندم. چقدر ترجمه بدی بود و چقدر مفاهیم مزخرف در کنار هم جمع شده بود
July 22, 2016
(Except the chapter on Kuhn, I read the book. I will turn back the chapter but now, I consider as I have read. Anyway.)
I am not a person who is interested in philosophy of science. I am already not interested in science; albeit all of that, Chalmer's introduction book is definetely piquant for me. Vocabulary is clear and connections between basic concepts and scholars on philosophy of science are well-advised and well-organized. This book is not guide and not a kind of 90 minutes for sth book, but moreover, it is not a masterpiece on the philosophy of science area. Indeed, it is a compherensive introduction book. I can recommend to people who are going to study philosophy of science.
I am not a person who is interested in philosophy of science. I am already not interested in science; albeit all of that, Chalmer's introduction book is definetely piquant for me. Vocabulary is clear and connections between basic concepts and scholars on philosophy of science are well-advised and well-organized. This book is not guide and not a kind of 90 minutes for sth book, but moreover, it is not a masterpiece on the philosophy of science area. Indeed, it is a compherensive introduction book. I can recommend to people who are going to study philosophy of science.
January 10, 2009
I highly doubt this man wrote something we didn't already know. Boring, obvious,and his examples are pretty much for children =(
May 7, 2012
I read it to get an idea of Science's history. It is really interesting, and has made me realise that Psychology really has to buck its ideas up if it wants to be considered a science.
July 1, 2020
really lovely little introduction to a couple of the key points of philosophy of science.
science is hard to define. so hard in fact that this book does not answer the question posed in the title.
the basic critiques of inductivism, falsificationism (à la Popper) and Kuhn's paradigm/scientific revolution idea are excellent and of use to anyone coming to the book purely interested in "science". the rest i would only recommend to people specifically interested in the philosophy of science.
NB to anyone skimming reviews before reading the book: please be advised that the various different editions seem to contain drastically revised content. this is why the reviews on goodreads seem to contradict each other, people complaining about topics being left out that were actually in the book, etc.
science is hard to define. so hard in fact that this book does not answer the question posed in the title.
the basic critiques of inductivism, falsificationism (à la Popper) and Kuhn's paradigm/scientific revolution idea are excellent and of use to anyone coming to the book purely interested in "science". the rest i would only recommend to people specifically interested in the philosophy of science.
NB to anyone skimming reviews before reading the book: please be advised that the various different editions seem to contain drastically revised content. this is why the reviews on goodreads seem to contradict each other, people complaining about topics being left out that were actually in the book, etc.
January 31, 2022
Εξαιρετική προσπάθεια!
Το συγκεκριμένο βιβλίο αποτελεί μια προσπάθεια να παρουσιαστούν οι κυριότερες επιστημολογικές θεωρίες του 20ου κυρίως αιώνα.
Το παράδοξο είναι ότι ενώ ο λόγος του είναι πολύ επιστημονικός και προσπαθεί να παρουσιάσει όλες τις πιθανές αντίθετες γνώμες,οι οποίες καταρρίπτουν αυτές τις θεωρίες, το βιβλίο είναι πολύ εύκολο στην ανάγνωση. Δεν χρησιμοποιεί εκλαϊκευμένη γλώσσα και όρους, αλλά η σύνταξη του είναι τέτοια που δεν χάνεσαι ανάμεσα στα νοήματα.
Προσωπικά το βρήκα ευχάριστο!
Καλή ανάγνωση
Το συγκεκριμένο βιβλίο αποτελεί μια προσπάθεια να παρουσιαστούν οι κυριότερες επιστημολογικές θεωρίες του 20ου κυρίως αιώνα.
Το παράδοξο είναι ότι ενώ ο λόγος του είναι πολύ επιστημονικός και προσπαθεί να παρουσιάσει όλες τις πιθανές αντίθετες γνώμες,οι οποίες καταρρίπτουν αυτές τις θεωρίες, το βιβλίο είναι πολύ εύκολο στην ανάγνωση. Δεν χρησιμοποιεί εκλαϊκευμένη γλώσσα και όρους, αλλά η σύνταξη του είναι τέτοια που δεν χάνεσαι ανάμεσα στα νοήματα.
Προσωπικά το βρήκα ευχάριστο!
Καλή ανάγνωση
October 3, 2022
bioloog Erast Parmasto võtab saatesõnas lühidalt kokku Chalmersi raamatu mõtte: Ainult võhik või teaduse teadlik moonutaja võib rääkida teaduseusust kui millestki haritlasele omasest; kus on uskumine, seal pole enam teadust. Muuhulgas on see ka täielik löök koroonaaegsele loosungile #usaldanteadust :')
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August 5, 2023Las comas, Juan, las comas.
March 22, 2022
فکر میکنم یکی از مشکلاتی که هم در جوامع علمی و هم در میان مردم وجود دارد ، بدیهی فرض کردن مساله چیستی علم است و از آنجا که از شروع مدرسه علم را بدون دیدی فلسفی و تاریخی درس میدهند دیدی والدانه و مقدس پیدا میکند، به طوری که بسیاری آن را چیزی تغییر ناپذیر فرض میکنند . این قضیه در میان دانشمندان گاهی منجر به توهم رسیدن به حقایق جهان به طور قطعی منجر میشود و نه یک مدل که حقایق در آن صدق میکنند. گاهی هم به دلیل غرور برخی دانشمندان به نتیجه گیری های فلسفی و فراتر از علم منجر میشود(به عنوان مثال در کتاب های ژورنالیستی
.امثال داوکینز) و توسط مردم به راحتی پذیرفته میشود. به هرحال این دیدگاه مقدس دانستن علم با فلسفه علم بسیار متعادل میشود
اما در مورد خود کتاب ! بنظرم کتاب به عنوان شروعی برای فلسفه علم کتاب خوبی است اما مشکلی که به نظرم میرسد این است که نویسنده قصد خود را معرفی نظریات فلسفه علم معرفی میکند اما این معرفی ها پر است نظرات شخصی و یک سوگیری ها.
.امثال داوکینز) و توسط مردم به راحتی پذیرفته میشود. به هرحال این دیدگاه مقدس دانستن علم با فلسفه علم بسیار متعادل میشود
اما در مورد خود کتاب ! بنظرم کتاب به عنوان شروعی برای فلسفه علم کتاب خوبی است اما مشکلی که به نظرم میرسد این است که نویسنده قصد خود را معرفی نظریات فلسفه علم معرفی میکند اما این معرفی ها پر است نظرات شخصی و یک سوگیری ها.
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August 5, 2023Avemariapurísima
November 13, 2014
ترجمه در بعضي فرازها فوق العاده و در برخي مواقع بد بود. اگرچه تقريبا در هيچ كجا آزاردهنده و مخل به فهم مقصود نويسنده نميشد ولي براي مثال برخي از برگردان هاي انتخابي مترجم يا صحيح نبودند و يا گمراه كننده بودند. علاوه بر اين حروفچيني طبق معمول بد و اذيت كننده بود.
خود كتاب در نيمه ي اول بسيار خوب و در نيمه ي دوم كه نويسنده دست به توضيح نظريات خودش ميزد بسيار مبهم بود و از پس اقناع خواننده بر نمي آمد.
به هر حال جزو معدود منابع فلسفه علم به زبان فارسي است و خواندنش براي اهلش واجب.
خود كتاب در نيمه ي اول بسيار خوب و در نيمه ي دوم كه نويسنده دست به توضيح نظريات خودش ميزد بسيار مبهم بود و از پس اقناع خواننده بر نمي آمد.
به هر حال جزو معدود منابع فلسفه علم به زبان فارسي است و خواندنش براي اهلش واجب.
December 12, 2014
حقیقتش را بخواهید چالمرز آموزگار خوبی بود و من در زمینه ی فلسفه ی علم چیزی نمی دانستم که بخواهم نقدی بر آن وارد کنم.
نکتهای که در باب کتاب وجود داشت این بود که تماماً مثال های علم فیزیک بررسی شده بود و من از فیزیک هیچ نمی دانم. شاید همین بود که دنبال کردن را قدری برایم دشوار می کرد.
این کتاب را برای درک بهتر فلسفه ی علوم اجتماعی خواندم و نکته ی طنز هم اینجا بود که چالمرز در جای جای کتاب به صورت کلی علوم اجتماعی را به عنوان یک علم نفی می کرد.
نکتهای که در باب کتاب وجود داشت این بود که تماماً مثال های علم فیزیک بررسی شده بود و من از فیزیک هیچ نمی دانم. شاید همین بود که دنبال کردن را قدری برایم دشوار می کرد.
این کتاب را برای درک بهتر فلسفه ی علوم اجتماعی خواندم و نکته ی طنز هم اینجا بود که چالمرز در جای جای کتاب به صورت کلی علوم اجتماعی را به عنوان یک علم نفی می کرد.
April 8, 2017
Los primeros 10 capítulos son los más claros. Cuando arranca con Bayes, el Nuevo Experimentalismo, Realismo y Antirealismo, sospecho que Alan comenzó abusar del cafe y el whisky porque la redacción hasta el momento digna de Shakespeare (si escribiera ensayos) se volvió oscura como el futuro de la humanidad.
April 8, 2024
Probablemente el libro más interesante que leí en el instituto. Aquí fue cuando entendí que la ciencia no es, ni pretende ser, infalible. Aquí fue cuando entendí que el método científico no es nada más (y nada menos) que la herramienta más eficaz que hemos encontrado para atrapar esa cosa tan escurridiza que es la certeza.
May 22, 2021
tive que ler pra faculdade kk, bom no sentindo de ser informativo porém, muito chato, mas eu já esperava então não considero um demérito
September 11, 2018
كتاب خوبي بنظر مي امد.
زيادي دقيق و فلسفي نيست. زياد هم علمي نيست.
بنظر براي نوجوانان خوب مي ايد.
قابل فهم و ساده اما ترجمه. امان از ترجمه . با اينكه جملات در درست ترين و قابل فهم ترين حالت دستور زباني بودند اما كلمات بسيار وحشتناك بودند. كلمات عربي و قلمبه و سلمبه. شايد اگر دائره المعارفي در انتهاي كتاب تعبيه شده بود بهتر ميشد!
كتاب تاريخي يا علمي يا فلسفي انچناني نبود. گويي چالمرز سعي داشت صرفا مارا با نظراتش درباره ي يكسري نظريات محدود اشنا كند.
متن تماما بي غرض نوشته نشده بود و خيلي كلي بيان شده بود.
البته براي شروع كتاب خوبي ست. ساده و كلي با مثالهاي زياد و گيرا.
شايد فراي حوصله باشد خواندنش ولي خالي از لطف نيست.
زيادي دقيق و فلسفي نيست. زياد هم علمي نيست.
بنظر براي نوجوانان خوب مي ايد.
قابل فهم و ساده اما ترجمه. امان از ترجمه . با اينكه جملات در درست ترين و قابل فهم ترين حالت دستور زباني بودند اما كلمات بسيار وحشتناك بودند. كلمات عربي و قلمبه و سلمبه. شايد اگر دائره المعارفي در انتهاي كتاب تعبيه شده بود بهتر ميشد!
كتاب تاريخي يا علمي يا فلسفي انچناني نبود. گويي چالمرز سعي داشت صرفا مارا با نظراتش درباره ي يكسري نظريات محدود اشنا كند.
متن تماما بي غرض نوشته نشده بود و خيلي كلي بيان شده بود.
البته براي شروع كتاب خوبي ست. ساده و كلي با مثالهاي زياد و گيرا.
شايد فراي حوصله باشد خواندنش ولي خالي از لطف نيست.
December 20, 2024
Manual que resume los problemas que se tratan en filosofía de la ciencia, como que se puede considerar parte de la misma, el problema de la inducción, el falsacionismo o la sustitución de unas teorías por otras.
Resaltar que no es un manual de historia de la ciencia, sino de filosofía de la ciencia.
Muy recomendable para iniciarse en el tema.
Resaltar que no es un manual de historia de la ciencia, sino de filosofía de la ciencia.
Muy recomendable para iniciarse en el tema.
April 18, 2019
Πολύ κατανοητό στα θέματα που πραγματεύεται, ιδανικό για όσους ενδιαφέρονται για την ιστορία και τη φιλοσοφία της επιστήμης. Από τα εγχειρίδια του προγράμματος του Ευρωπαϊκού Πολιτισμού στο ΕΑΠ, στη θεματική ενότητα των Επιστημών της Φύσης και του Ανθρώπου στην Ευρώπη.
February 28, 2023
J’ai hate de lire un livre pour le fun
November 11, 2017
Alan F. Chalmers introduces his 1982 book What Is This Thing Called Science? with the smilingly discouraging words: “we start off confused and end up confused on a higher level”.
In the end does Chalmers have us more confused on the topic of modern science, than we were in prior to reading his book? Definitely! Readers most probably start to question whether science has the ultimate authority in explaining the world around us. How exactly do scientists obtain their authoritative results that seem to permeate guide our modern lives? Are they as grounded in objectivity and reason as they would have us think? Is it true that “science has no special features that render it intrinsically superior to other branches of knowledge such as ancient myths or Voodoo”(Feywrabend).
The question is especially poignant today when dubious concept of science is used to justify the treatment of people like machines, during the education process and via the standardized tests to name just one example.
Future might hold another scientific revolution and what we thought to be impossible may become mundane; on the other hand, things that seemed scientific will be deemed superstitions. Or we might simply destroy what we have through wars and greed, and go back to primitive living with our posterity gazing at the skyscrapers of Manhattan with the same superstitious awe as we do gaze upon the pyramids of Giza. We simply do not know what the future might hold for us, as we did not know 500 years ago, before the current scientific revolution.
The word TRUTH has been used 30 times throughout this book, and yet readers are as far from understanding what it really stands for as they were in the beginning.On (p.147) Chalmers writes that “realism involves notion of truth, for the realist science aims at true descriptions of what the world is really like.” The concept of TRUTH starts to sound somewhat metaphysical. Since we are limited by our senses of perception and theories (that keep changing) in understanding of the world that is permanent and beyond us, it is quite possible that we will never be able to comprehend the absolute reality, objectivity or for that matter the elusive ‘truth’. Finite beings that are, we are not capable of comprehending and therefore describing the infinite with our finite methods and tools, that we have invented. Chalmers returns idealists to harsh reality by proclaiming (p. xvi) that “attempts to give a simple and straightforward logical reconstruction of the scientific method encounter further difficulties when it is realized there is no method that enables scientific theories to be conclusively [proved or ] disproved.
But we are humans. At some point in our history we were killing prey with sticks, today we send robots to Mars. Our knowledge (whether accurate or not) about the universe keeps expanding, and in order to feel comfortable and hopeful (looking at the empty space between the stars or between the electrons) we cling to theories, religions, sciences, statistics, and words like ‘’truth’.
Some of us will always be like Jesus and Buddha who testified of the Truth. Others will remain like Pilate who questioned: “What is Truth”? I’m not sure about Jesus , but Budai might have replied in Feywrabend’s words “anything goes”!
Rationalism vs Relativism; Objectivism; Realism;, Instrumentalism and Truth; unrepresentative realism
In the concluding chapters of his book What Is This Thing Called Science? A. F. Chalmers discusses several more theories that attempt to explain the world and the way science operates in it. On (p.36) Chalmers introduced a doubt in his readers’ minds that rival and more modern approaches than inductivism are necessary to shed light on the nature of science . We finally have a chance to see what he had in mind and whether his book has fulfilled its lofty purpose.
Rationalism vs Relativism
On (p. 119) Chalmers quotes J.R. Ravetz who said that “ Scientific knowledge is achieved by a complex social endeavor, and derives from the work of many craftsmen in their special interaction with the world of nature”. As a consequence neverending debates between Kuhn, Lakatos, Popper, Marx and others made philosophers question the very terms they were operating. According to Chalmers (p.101) “the extreme rationalist asserts that there is a single, timeless, universal criterion with reference to which the relative merits of rival theories are to be assessed” and further on (p 102)“the extreme rationalist sees the decisions and choices of scientists as being guided by the universal criterion”.
On the other hand on (p.102) he cautions that relativist “denies that there is a universal, ahistorical standard of rationality with respect to which one theory can be judged better than the other”. Do we see the world through the veils of Maya, the great illusion of separateness? Therefore Chalmers concludes that (p.103) “since for the relativist, the criteria for judging the merits of theories will depend on the values or interests of the individual or community ....the distinction between science and nonscience will vary accordingly” therefore Marx’ ideas are good science for some and propaganda for others, etc.
Next Chalmers proceeds to present Lakatos as rationalist and Khun as relativist.
Philosophy of Lakatos according to Chalmers (p. 104) “in the absence of rational criteria to guide theory choice, theory change becomes akin to religious conversion”.
Since both science and religion are human attempts to explain the perplexing world around us it is noteworthy to mention that “Carl Gustav Jung... thought that the unconscious could play a redemptive role in life. Hence, conversion can be thought of as a precipitation from the unconscious and is, generally, for the good. It reorientates the individual around a new center of previously submerged energy.”
On (p.106) Chalmers concludes that Lakatos was more historian of science than the scientist, since Lakatos “failed to offer the rationalist account of science that many of his remarks indicate he intended to give”
Khhun according to Chalmers ( p.107) belonged to the school of relativism “whether or not one theory is better than others to be judged relative to the standards of the appropriate community, and those standards will typically vary with the cultural; and historic setting of the community” Today we deem eugenics as pseudoscience, unlike Americans and Europeans in the 1930ies. If the scientific truth keeps changing, is it THE truth?
Writing about Popper, Lakatos and Marx (p. 121) Chalmers notes that “although individuals may come to have some grasp of the nature of the social structure in which they live, there will always be a cleavage between the structure and workings of the society and the distorted reflections in individual minds”. It is scary to think that at some point it was unthinkable--- that Earth was not the center of the universe, but today it is unthinkable that we are not at the highest stage of human development. Who can guarantee us that since the first concept was refuted by science, the second one won’t at some point in time?
Chalmers highlights on (p108) that ”whilst Kuhn maintains that science does progress in some sense, Kuhn is quite unambiguous in his denial that it can be said to progress towards the truth in any well defined sense”,and Chalmers agrees with Khun on this point.
Chalmers summarises that (p109) “Lakatos aimed to give a rationalist account of science but failed, whilst Kuhn denied that he aimed to give a relativist account of science but gave one nevertheless”.
Objectivism
Chalmers gives the following definition of (p.113) “is a view which stresses that items of knowledge, from simple propositions to complex theories have properties and characteristics that transcend the beliefs and states of awareness of the individuals that device and contemplate them” And that it is (p.115) “knowledge treated as something outside rather than inside the minds or brains of individuals”. Here Chalmers hints that human consciousness could reside either in the brain or in the minds, the question is still open.
According to Chalmers (p.114) “individual human beings have two ways of acquiring knowledge about the world, thinking and observing--rationalist and empiricist”. Were Hindu mathematicians that came up with the concept of zero- rationalists or empiricists?
Relativism, instrumentalism, and truth
According to Chalmers (p.147) instrumentalism “in its extreme form involves a sharp distinction between concepts applicable to observable situations and theoretical concerts”.
And on (p.148) “whether there are things existing in the world besides observable things, which are perhaps responsible for the behaviour of observable things, need not concern the naive instrumentalist. Science provides no sure means of bridging the gap between the observable and the unobservable. It is not the business of science to establish what may exist beyond the realm of observation”.
This explanation sounds like Buddhism where Gautama Buddha rejected the existence of a creator deity, refusing to endorse many views on creation. In Buddhism no dependence of phenomena on a supernatural reality is asserted in order to explain the behaviour of matter.
This philosophy of relativism allowed (p.150) Copernicus to claim hypothesis need not to be true or even probable-as a long as they provide a calculus consistent with the observations that alone is sufficient.
Theory and truth
Chalmers (p. 151) teaches that ”sentence ‘’the cat is on the mat’ is true if it corresponds to the facts i,.e.the sentence is true if things are as the sentence says they are and false otherwise.” But how are we to be sure that what we see is a cat? In the middle ages, forefathers of modern-day civilized and politically correct Europeans were absolutely convinced that the women they were burning were witches, and God was approving their deeds. Homosehuals who were deemed mentaly ill (USA) some 40 years ago, are being hailed as the new civil rights activists of today.Will polygamy be reinstituted and decriminalized in the years to come? These are the questions an honest social scientist should be asking today. Social science is akin to physics whose aim (p.163) is to find“limits of applicability of current theories and to develop theories that are applicable to the world to a greater degree” .
But our world is infinitely more complex than cats and mats. Bhaskar (p.154) is quoted as saying “ Laws in science can not be appropriately interpreted as expressing relationships between sets of events , as many empiricist would have it ”.
Scientists today simply (p.155) “ pick out certain properties or characteristics that can be attributed to objects or systems in the world and express the ways in which those objects or systems tend to behave by virtue of those properties or characteristics”.
Thus the future holds infinitely many theories and explanations of reality. One day we might wake up on the morn of yet another scientific revolution (paradigm shift) in the world where it is scientifically proven that the world is a hologram.
I also do not discount the possibility of the science reconciling with the religion and perhaps announcing the reality as “one ‘dadada ’ with ‘ten thousand functions, ten thousand things, one suchness,’ and we’re all one suchness. And that means that suchness comes and goes like anything else because this whole world is an on-and-off system. As the Chinese say, it’s the _yang_ and the _yin_, and therefore it consists of ‘now you see it, now you don’t, here you are, here you aren’t, here you are,’ because that the nature of energy, to be like waves, and waves have crests and troughs.”
Who knows?
In the end does Chalmers have us more confused on the topic of modern science, than we were in prior to reading his book? Definitely! Readers most probably start to question whether science has the ultimate authority in explaining the world around us. How exactly do scientists obtain their authoritative results that seem to permeate guide our modern lives? Are they as grounded in objectivity and reason as they would have us think? Is it true that “science has no special features that render it intrinsically superior to other branches of knowledge such as ancient myths or Voodoo”(Feywrabend).
The question is especially poignant today when dubious concept of science is used to justify the treatment of people like machines, during the education process and via the standardized tests to name just one example.
Future might hold another scientific revolution and what we thought to be impossible may become mundane; on the other hand, things that seemed scientific will be deemed superstitions. Or we might simply destroy what we have through wars and greed, and go back to primitive living with our posterity gazing at the skyscrapers of Manhattan with the same superstitious awe as we do gaze upon the pyramids of Giza. We simply do not know what the future might hold for us, as we did not know 500 years ago, before the current scientific revolution.
The word TRUTH has been used 30 times throughout this book, and yet readers are as far from understanding what it really stands for as they were in the beginning.On (p.147) Chalmers writes that “realism involves notion of truth, for the realist science aims at true descriptions of what the world is really like.” The concept of TRUTH starts to sound somewhat metaphysical. Since we are limited by our senses of perception and theories (that keep changing) in understanding of the world that is permanent and beyond us, it is quite possible that we will never be able to comprehend the absolute reality, objectivity or for that matter the elusive ‘truth’. Finite beings that are, we are not capable of comprehending and therefore describing the infinite with our finite methods and tools, that we have invented. Chalmers returns idealists to harsh reality by proclaiming (p. xvi) that “attempts to give a simple and straightforward logical reconstruction of the scientific method encounter further difficulties when it is realized there is no method that enables scientific theories to be conclusively [proved or ] disproved.
But we are humans. At some point in our history we were killing prey with sticks, today we send robots to Mars. Our knowledge (whether accurate or not) about the universe keeps expanding, and in order to feel comfortable and hopeful (looking at the empty space between the stars or between the electrons) we cling to theories, religions, sciences, statistics, and words like ‘’truth’.
Some of us will always be like Jesus and Buddha who testified of the Truth. Others will remain like Pilate who questioned: “What is Truth”? I’m not sure about Jesus , but Budai might have replied in Feywrabend’s words “anything goes”!
Rationalism vs Relativism; Objectivism; Realism;, Instrumentalism and Truth; unrepresentative realism
In the concluding chapters of his book What Is This Thing Called Science? A. F. Chalmers discusses several more theories that attempt to explain the world and the way science operates in it. On (p.36) Chalmers introduced a doubt in his readers’ minds that rival and more modern approaches than inductivism are necessary to shed light on the nature of science . We finally have a chance to see what he had in mind and whether his book has fulfilled its lofty purpose.
Rationalism vs Relativism
On (p. 119) Chalmers quotes J.R. Ravetz who said that “ Scientific knowledge is achieved by a complex social endeavor, and derives from the work of many craftsmen in their special interaction with the world of nature”. As a consequence neverending debates between Kuhn, Lakatos, Popper, Marx and others made philosophers question the very terms they were operating. According to Chalmers (p.101) “the extreme rationalist asserts that there is a single, timeless, universal criterion with reference to which the relative merits of rival theories are to be assessed” and further on (p 102)“the extreme rationalist sees the decisions and choices of scientists as being guided by the universal criterion”.
On the other hand on (p.102) he cautions that relativist “denies that there is a universal, ahistorical standard of rationality with respect to which one theory can be judged better than the other”. Do we see the world through the veils of Maya, the great illusion of separateness? Therefore Chalmers concludes that (p.103) “since for the relativist, the criteria for judging the merits of theories will depend on the values or interests of the individual or community ....the distinction between science and nonscience will vary accordingly” therefore Marx’ ideas are good science for some and propaganda for others, etc.
Next Chalmers proceeds to present Lakatos as rationalist and Khun as relativist.
Philosophy of Lakatos according to Chalmers (p. 104) “in the absence of rational criteria to guide theory choice, theory change becomes akin to religious conversion”.
Since both science and religion are human attempts to explain the perplexing world around us it is noteworthy to mention that “Carl Gustav Jung... thought that the unconscious could play a redemptive role in life. Hence, conversion can be thought of as a precipitation from the unconscious and is, generally, for the good. It reorientates the individual around a new center of previously submerged energy.”
On (p.106) Chalmers concludes that Lakatos was more historian of science than the scientist, since Lakatos “failed to offer the rationalist account of science that many of his remarks indicate he intended to give”
Khhun according to Chalmers ( p.107) belonged to the school of relativism “whether or not one theory is better than others to be judged relative to the standards of the appropriate community, and those standards will typically vary with the cultural; and historic setting of the community” Today we deem eugenics as pseudoscience, unlike Americans and Europeans in the 1930ies. If the scientific truth keeps changing, is it THE truth?
Writing about Popper, Lakatos and Marx (p. 121) Chalmers notes that “although individuals may come to have some grasp of the nature of the social structure in which they live, there will always be a cleavage between the structure and workings of the society and the distorted reflections in individual minds”. It is scary to think that at some point it was unthinkable--- that Earth was not the center of the universe, but today it is unthinkable that we are not at the highest stage of human development. Who can guarantee us that since the first concept was refuted by science, the second one won’t at some point in time?
Chalmers highlights on (p108) that ”whilst Kuhn maintains that science does progress in some sense, Kuhn is quite unambiguous in his denial that it can be said to progress towards the truth in any well defined sense”,and Chalmers agrees with Khun on this point.
Chalmers summarises that (p109) “Lakatos aimed to give a rationalist account of science but failed, whilst Kuhn denied that he aimed to give a relativist account of science but gave one nevertheless”.
Objectivism
Chalmers gives the following definition of (p.113) “is a view which stresses that items of knowledge, from simple propositions to complex theories have properties and characteristics that transcend the beliefs and states of awareness of the individuals that device and contemplate them” And that it is (p.115) “knowledge treated as something outside rather than inside the minds or brains of individuals”. Here Chalmers hints that human consciousness could reside either in the brain or in the minds, the question is still open.
According to Chalmers (p.114) “individual human beings have two ways of acquiring knowledge about the world, thinking and observing--rationalist and empiricist”. Were Hindu mathematicians that came up with the concept of zero- rationalists or empiricists?
Relativism, instrumentalism, and truth
According to Chalmers (p.147) instrumentalism “in its extreme form involves a sharp distinction between concepts applicable to observable situations and theoretical concerts”.
And on (p.148) “whether there are things existing in the world besides observable things, which are perhaps responsible for the behaviour of observable things, need not concern the naive instrumentalist. Science provides no sure means of bridging the gap between the observable and the unobservable. It is not the business of science to establish what may exist beyond the realm of observation”.
This explanation sounds like Buddhism where Gautama Buddha rejected the existence of a creator deity, refusing to endorse many views on creation. In Buddhism no dependence of phenomena on a supernatural reality is asserted in order to explain the behaviour of matter.
This philosophy of relativism allowed (p.150) Copernicus to claim hypothesis need not to be true or even probable-as a long as they provide a calculus consistent with the observations that alone is sufficient.
Theory and truth
Chalmers (p. 151) teaches that ”sentence ‘’the cat is on the mat’ is true if it corresponds to the facts i,.e.the sentence is true if things are as the sentence says they are and false otherwise.” But how are we to be sure that what we see is a cat? In the middle ages, forefathers of modern-day civilized and politically correct Europeans were absolutely convinced that the women they were burning were witches, and God was approving their deeds. Homosehuals who were deemed mentaly ill (USA) some 40 years ago, are being hailed as the new civil rights activists of today.Will polygamy be reinstituted and decriminalized in the years to come? These are the questions an honest social scientist should be asking today. Social science is akin to physics whose aim (p.163) is to find“limits of applicability of current theories and to develop theories that are applicable to the world to a greater degree” .
But our world is infinitely more complex than cats and mats. Bhaskar (p.154) is quoted as saying “ Laws in science can not be appropriately interpreted as expressing relationships between sets of events , as many empiricist would have it ”.
Scientists today simply (p.155) “ pick out certain properties or characteristics that can be attributed to objects or systems in the world and express the ways in which those objects or systems tend to behave by virtue of those properties or characteristics”.
Thus the future holds infinitely many theories and explanations of reality. One day we might wake up on the morn of yet another scientific revolution (paradigm shift) in the world where it is scientifically proven that the world is a hologram.
I also do not discount the possibility of the science reconciling with the religion and perhaps announcing the reality as “one ‘dadada ’ with ‘ten thousand functions, ten thousand things, one suchness,’ and we’re all one suchness. And that means that suchness comes and goes like anything else because this whole world is an on-and-off system. As the Chinese say, it’s the _yang_ and the _yin_, and therefore it consists of ‘now you see it, now you don’t, here you are, here you aren’t, here you are,’ because that the nature of energy, to be like waves, and waves have crests and troughs.”
Who knows?
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