What Is This Thing Called Science?
eBook - ePub

What Is This Thing Called Science?

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

What Is This Thing Called Science?

About this book

Co-published with the University of Queensland Press. HPC holds rights in North America and U. S. Dependencies.

Since its first publication in 1976, Alan Chalmers's highly regarded and widely read work--translated into eighteen languages--has become a classic introduction to the scientific method, known for its accessibility to beginners and its value as a resource for advanced students and scholars.

In addition to overall improvements and updates inspired by Chalmers's experience as a teacher, comments from his readers, and recent developments in the field, this fourth edition features an extensive chapter-long postscript that draws on his research into the history of atomism to illustrate important themes in the philosophy of science. Identifying the qualitative difference between knowledge of atoms as it figures in contemporary science and metaphysical speculations about atoms common in philosophy since the time of Democritus offers a revealing and instructive way to address the question at the heart of this groundbreaking work: What is this thing called science?

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Yes, you can access What Is This Thing Called Science? by Alan F. Chalmers in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Philosophy & Ethics in Science. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. About the Author
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Titles of Related Interest Available from Hackett Publishing
  6. Contents
  7. Preface to the first edition
  8. Preface to the second edition
  9. Preface to the third edition
  10. Preface to the fourth edition
  11. Introduction
  12. 1. Science as knowledge derived from the facts of experience
  13. 2. Observation as practical intervention
  14. 3. Experiment
  15. 4. Deriving theories from the facts: induction
  16. 5. Introducing falsificationism
  17. 6. Sophisticated falsificationism, novel predictions and the growth of science
  18. 7. The limitations of falsificationism
  19. 8. Theories as structures I: Kuhn’s paradigms
  20. 9. Theories as structures II: research programs
  21. 10. Feyerabend’s anarchistic theory of science
  22. 11. Methodical changes in method
  23. 12. The Bayesian approach
  24. 13. The new experimentalism
  25. 14. Why should the world obey laws?
  26. 15. Realism and anti-realism
  27. 16. Epilogue to the third edition
  28. 17. Postscript
  29. Notes
  30. Bibliography
  31. Index of names
  32. Back Cover