Alan Chalmers

Alan Chalmers is a British-born Australian philosopher of science, best known for What Is This Thing Called Science?, a short introduction first published in 1976 and translated into many languages. Born in Bristol, he trained as a physicist at Bristol and Manchester before writing a London doctorate on James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic theory. He taught at the University of Sydney from 1972 and headed its department of history and philosophy of science from 1986 to 1999, later becoming a visiting scholar at Flinders University. His textbook takes readers through inductivism, Popper's falsificationism, Kuhn's paradigms, Lakatos's research programmes and Feyerabend's anarchism, testing each against episodes from the history of science. His later work on the history of atomism argues that knowledge of atoms came from experimental science rather than from philosophical speculation.

Key ideas

• Science is not simply derived from observed facts: observation is shaped by theory, and what counts as a fact can be revised.
• Neither naive inductivism nor Popper's falsificationism gives an adequate account of how theories are tested and accepted.
• Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend each capture real features of scientific change, but none supplies a complete method.
• The history of atomism shows that knowledge of atoms was won by experiment, not by centuries of philosophical argument.

Major works

• What Is This Thing Called Science? (1976; 4th edition 2013)
• Science and Its Fabrication (1990)
• The Scientist's Atom and the Philosopher's Stone (2009)

In the Book corner

• What Is This Thing Called Science? 1976 · Beginner
  A widely used introduction to the philosophy of science. Chalmers begins with the common view that science is derived from the facts…

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