What Is This Thing Called Science?

Rating:
Summary: What is this thing called Philosophy of Science?
Review: "Philosophy of science ... pointlessly scholastic activity which is liable to confuse the budding scientist" - Matthew Stewart, 'The Truth about Everything'.

Once upon a time, the wisest men in the land turned their thoughts to the vexed question of how it is possible for farriers to shoe horses. Some said that you nail specially shaped lumps of iron on the extremities located at the four corners, and if one drops off you replace it with another, hopefully longer-lasting; and that's the best you can do. But this was dismissed by almost all the wise men as too pedestrian for words.

One of the wise men won fame by pointing out that there was a time when people got by without ever shoeing their horses. Those people, he said, would have been quite unable to perceive why the moderns put dead weights on their horses' hooves (even though, of course, they were just as smart as us). This was called the incomprehensibility of paranickels. It was received with jubilation throughout the land, especially by those who thought that shoeing horses was rather a vulgar business, boringly technical and probably involving difficult sums; now they knew the secret and didn't have to bother.

Another wise man made his name by questioning how far the farriers could be said to be shoeing horses at all. Perhaps, he speculated, they and their customers only think that's what they're doing, or agree among themselves to say so. Anyway, nailing shoes to horses' heads ought to work just as well.

The greatest influence on cultured folk came from radical thinkers who doubted whether there were such things as 'horses' and 'horseshoes'; or, if by chance there were, whether 'shoeing horses' might not be better characterized as 'horsing shoes'. This was agreed by one and all to be clever and humorous and (because it was written mostly in French) deep as well.

By this time, since it was clear that a learned consensus on the farriers' art was nowhere in sight, it was suspected by some of the wise men, and by many who had caught snatches of the argument, that the farriers must be doing something wrong. This was called the epistemological crisis of the post-Enlightenment ferrous hegemony, and before long it was received wisdom in all the land. Simple country pomos would tell you about it at the drop of a hat. The farriers found this exasperating. One reportedly said that a philosophy of horse-shoeing is about as useful to farriers as ornithology is to birds. But he was a bongo-player and part-time Nobel laureate; that was just the kind of thing he said.

As to this book, it is nicely written and provides a solid, readable if uninspired introduction to the current state of play. Many readers will find it useful for filling in the background, bringing the story up to date, and yielding quality material for cocktail-party conversations. It is best read in conjunction with the same author's 'Science and Its Fabrication'. Of course, you must also read the wise men's original works (don't worry, we're not talking Wittgenstein here). But whatever you do, younkers, never go near a smithy : to this day, the farriers can still be seen there shamelessly nailing on lumps of iron, just as they always did.

Rating:
Summary: What is this thing called Philosophy of Science?
Review: "Philosophy of science ... pointlessly scholastic activity which is liable to confuse the budding scientist" - Matthew Stewart, 'The Truth about Everything'.

Once upon a time, the wisest men in the land turned their thoughts to the vexed question of how it is possible for farriers to shoe horses (actually, what they asked was: in what sense, if any, is it meaningful to say that 'farriers' 'shoe' 'horses'?). Some said that you nail specially shaped lumps of iron on the extremities located at the four corners, and if one drops off you replace it with another, hopefully longer-lasting; but this was dismissed by almost all the wise men as too pedestrian for words.

One of the wise men won fame by pointing out that there was a time when people got by without ever shoeing their horses. Those people, he said, would have been quite unable to perceive why the moderns put dead weights on their horses' hooves (even though, of course, they were just as smart as us). This was called the incomprehensibility of paranickels. It was received with jubilation throughout the land, especially by those who thought that shoeing horses was rather a vulgar business, boringly technical and probably involving difficult sums; now they knew the secret and didn't have to bother.

Another wise man made his name by questioning how far the farriers could be said to be shoeing horses at all. Perhaps, he speculated, they and their customers only think that's what they're doing, or agree among themselves to say so; anyway, nailing shoes to horses' heads ought to work just as well.

The greatest influence on cultured folk came from radical thinkers who doubted whether there were such things as 'horses' and 'horseshoes'; or, if by chance there were, whether 'shoeing horses' might not be better characterized as 'horsing shoes'. This was agreed by one and all to be clever and humorous and (because it was written mostly in French) deep as well.

By this time, since it was clear that a learned consensus on the farriers' art was nowhere in sight, it was suspected by some of the wise men, and by many who had caught snatches of the argument, that the farriers must be doing something wrong. This was called the epistemological crisis of the post-Enlightenment ferrous hegemony, and before long it was received wisdom in all the land. Simple country pomos would tell you about it at the drop of a hat. The farriers found this exasperating. One reportedly said that a philosophy of horse-shoeing is about as useful to farriers as ornithology is to birds. But he was a bongo-player and part-time Nobel laureate; that was just the kind of thing he said.

As to this book, it is nicely written and provides a solid, readable if uninspired introduction to the current state of play. Many readers will find it useful for filling in the background, bringing the story up to date, and yielding quality material for cocktail-party conversations. It is best read in conjunction with the same author's 'Science and Its Fabrication'. Of course, you must also read the wise men's original works (don't worry, we're not talking Wittgenstein here). But whatever you do, younkers, never go near a smithy: to this day, the farriers can still be seen there shamelessly nailing on lumps of iron, just as they always did.

Rating:
Summary: A primer for skeptics
Review: Alan Chalmers wrote this book (first published in 1976) because there was no suitable introductory text for undergraduate studies in the history and philosophy of science. The preliminary chapters are devoted to a close scrutiny and demolition of the old orthodoxy in the pre-Popperian philosophy of science, an orthodoxy still nurtured by admirers of the late David Stove. Anything Goes by David Stove is supposed to be a weapon in the battle against the barbarians of deconstructionism but if Chalmers and Popper are on the right track, then turning to Stove and the inductivists for help is like fighting fire with petrol. It can be argued that the long domination of the logical positivists in the philosophy of science created such a mess (and a boring mess to boot) that many students were driven into the sociology of science or to the more radical camp of the deconstructionists.

Chalmers notes the common belief that the authority of science depends on the way that it "is derived from the facts". However, as many research students discover when they turn from the bench to start writing up their results, it is very misleading to hope that accumulated observations will turn into general principles or theories (or a thesis). Still, scientific theories are supposed to be based on facts and confirmed by facts, and for a long time the official scientific method was an alleged process of induction, whereby scientific knowledge starts with the unbiased observation of the regularities which exist in the world around us and is finally warranted or verified by inductive proof. Chalmers explains with meticulous care how and why inductive verification and warranting does not work. Moreover he explains that it is not necessary to account for the growth or rationality of scientific knowledge.

One of the problems with the observational origin of theories is the abstract nature of advanced scientific theories. Electrons, wave currents and force fields are simply not accessible to observation, nor are the principles of natural selection or the laws of supply and demand. Equally embarrassing is the logical problem of induction. However many black ravens you observe, there is no way to prove that all ravens (in the universe) are black.

Popper's contribution to advance the debate was a revamped version of the hypothetico-deductive method foreshadowed by Jevons, Whewell, Pierce and the French physiologist Bernard. He argued that knowledge advances by a problem-oriented process of conjecture, followed by rigorous testing of tentative solutions. Then we may select the best among the competing theories by its ability to survive the process of testing, or for its convenience if it is to be used for engineering calculations, or for its fertility if it is to used to inspire further research. Falsified theories need not be discarded because they may stage a revival, they may have instrumental value and they may persist as components of a larger structure.

Popper's ideas were unfortunately labeled "falsificationism" because they were advanced in the 1930s as a rejoinder to the logical positivists who wanted to use factual verification as a criterion of meaning. The "falsificationism" label was unfortunate and very misleading. As Popper recognized, there are problems with experimental or observational testing which preclude logically decisive falsifications. When other people noticed these problems, they claimed that this "falsified" Popper's theory of knowledge and scientific method. This is not the case, because Popper's theory is more appropriately called "the non-authoritarian theory of knowledge" (because there is no ultimate authority) or "conjectural objective knowledge" (in contrast with the traditional quest for justified beliefs). But still, the impossibility of obtaining decisive falsifications was used by critics as the rationale to prematurely eliminate Popper from the main game in the 1970s. This was partly due to the raging success of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which captured the sociological spirit of the age with a beguiling account of the diffusion of intellectual innovations in the scientific community.

One of the most valuable sections of this book is the scrutiny of Kuhn and here Chalmers identifies profound ambiguity. Kuhn insists that there is evolutionary progress in science, on the other it is hard to reconcile this view with the `gestalt switching' process that is supposed to occur as people move from one paradigm to the next. Chalmers points out that the "gestalt switching' and the notion of incommensurability of paradigms can be put aside if one makes some fairly uncontroversial assumptions about the objectivity of scientific theories. In a previous publication, Science and its Fabrication, Chalmers has argued in a similar vein against the strong proponents of the sociology of science.

Turning to Lakatos, with his notion of a "hard core" of a research program which has to be protected from falsification by deflecting criticism to other "non core" elements of the program, Chalmers finds that there is no satisfactory guide to the selection of theories to be protected from the rigors of criticism. The radical views of Feyerabend are carefully dissected and Chalmers concedes that there are probably no universal and timeless standards in the philosophy of science. However this is not a concession that "anything goes" because it simply mirrors the situation in science itself.

This book can be recommended for anyone who wants to obtain a firmer grasp of science and its rationale. The writing style is clear, engaging and unpretentious. The book is packed with episodes from the history of science so that there is a great deal to be learned about science itself in addition to the philosophical lessons that Chalmers has to convey. The major deficiency in the book is the inadequate characterization of Popper as a "falsificationist" and the neglect of Popper's theory of metaphysical research programs which appeared in the third volume of his "Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery" in 1982.

Rating:
Summary: Introduction to the Scientific Method
Review: Chalmers's book is the widely read and well-received classical and basic introduction to the epistemology of science. Though this book has important insights that can be applied to the quantitative studies in social science, it is essentially an introduction to the philosophy of natural sciences.

Basic concepts and important thinkers are dealt with in order in separate chapters and at the end of each chapter a critique is provided and entries for further reading are provided. The latest edition of the book includes an extensive chapter on Feyerabend and his radical agenda.

Besides this the themes covered in the book include observation, experiment, induction, falsification, Kuhn, Popper, Bayes, realism and anti-realism.

It is a handy reference work for graduate students and scholars alike who would like to know more about the selection process of hypotheses, how and why hypotheses can be rejected, how important a framework is for any "scientific" research, what it means to have a paradigm shift et cetera. All in all, it is a seminal introduction to the scientific method.

Rating:
Summary: Recommended textbook
Review: I recommend this textbook on the philosophy of science (and I thus disagree with the anonymous review by "A reader from Baltimore, Maryland", and I do not find anonymous reviews helpful).It is translated to many languages and fulfils a great need for a textbook. In shorter courses it is not possible to read all the original works and it is better to have a short presentation of Thomas Kuhn along with a presentation of the discussion of and further development of his work. Chapter 3 on the theory dependence of observation is especially important. I have used this text in courses and found it useful, although some of the final chapters are somewhat unclear. I can think of no other book, which can replace this one for a shorter course in the philosophy of science for undergraduates in fields outside philosophy itself. (Compare my review of Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Rating:
Summary: modern philosophy of science made comprehensible.
Review: the philosophy of science is arguably the most promising field of philosophy today. It is also the most technical and perhaps the most abstruse. A.F. Chalmers has done a great job in trying to give a fair account of each of the most popular currents of the field. His criticisms of these are clever and well-founded. If you are interested in the philo of science but find the original works too technical then buy this book. Though you surely will not be able of giving a detailed account of each currents of thought, you will, nonetheless, have enough knowledge to help you tackle the thinkers'original works. vladimir pintro, student of philo at s.u.n.y.

Rating:
Summary: Start right here
Review: This book is a beast who tries to serve two masters. On the one hand, it is meant to serve as a brief introductory text to the philosophy of science. At least, much of the narrative language and presentation seem directed at that goal, and it was as such that I encountered it. On the other hand, it serves as a tentative monograph of Chalmers' own approach to the question voiced by the title.

The middle chapters (one through fifteen) serve as a brief introduction to main theories of philosophy of science, roughly in chronological order. In the first four chapters he lays the foundation of the "common-sense" view, or inductivism, though he doesn't deal with the theorists of this tradition directly. The following chapters cover Popper's falsificationism, Kuhn's scientific paradigms, Lakatos' research programs, Feyerabend's anti-methodism (or anarchism), Bayesian probabilism, the new experimentalism expounded by Deborah Mayo, and the arguments of realism versus anti-realism.

For each theory considered, Chalmers presents counter-arguments with such force as to lead one to believe-despite his protestations to the contrary-that nothing more substantial than Feyerabend's relativism can be defended.

To elucidate the strengths and weaknesses of each theory, Chalmers examines fundamental experiments from the history of physics and astronomy. There were difficult for me to follow, my education in physics and chemistry being nearly a decade in my past. And they were altogether impossible for the student I was tutoring whom, having no background in the physical sciences or their history, was ill-placed in this class.

By the time the reader reaches the epilogue, he has forgotten that Chalmers has his own theoretical ax to grind, I had to go back and re-read the prefaces and introduction to refresh my memory, which reinforced to me Chalmers' own ambivalence and ambiguity concerning his task. At any rate, this short closing manifesto, where Chalmers states that no universal theory of science is possible, but that an epistemology of science can be grounded in historical studies "of the appropriate kind", doesn't find grounding or explication in the text. It is merely mentioned at its end.

Rating:
Summary: A primer for skeptics
Review: This is an excellent text for skeptics to obtain a grasp on the state of the art in the modern philosophy of science. It provides rather more detail than many people will require but it does indicate clearly how the old "positivist" philosophy of science did not really work, and it provides a good survey of the more up to date ideas in the field. Chalmers is especially helpful in showing the limitations of Kuhn and providing a balanced perspective on Popper, Lakatos and Feyerabend.