Alan Chalmers

Alan Francis Chalmers is a historian of sciences and epistemologist born in England and established in Australia (University of Queensland). He studied the Physique in the Bristol-board Universities, Manchester and London. Physicist in the beginning, he was the pupil of Imre Lakatos and thus formed in the tradition poppérienne.

He is the author of What is this thing called Science? ( What science? ), published in 1976, twice republished, altered and supplemented - 3rd edition: 1999.

It reviews there criteria used in the history to define the Science:

observation of the facts, opposed to the experiment - Poincaré had also a reflection on the choice of the interesting facts.
the Réfutabilité
the Paradigm S (the cultural and social aspect, community)
the Objectivity (the Truth immanente - transcendent)
the Realism and anti-realism (Duhem, Poincaré, the intuitionalism, the Interpretation of Copenhagen)
the theories bayésiennes (absolute and relative)
the Progress

He wrote later on Science and its Fabrication ( the Manufacture of science ), published in 1990. Into this second book, it as well rejects like axiamatisation of knowledge the positivism of Karl Popper as the relativism of Paul Feyerabend, the first because it contradicts the history of sciences, the second because it is unable to dissociate sciences and Pseudo-science. Like alternative, he proposes:

to define sciences like uniform description of the world,
and in order to measure their success, to measure how sciences achieve this goal.

There remains itself on progress (in agreement with Lakatos,), but without seeing the circle from the point of view of the Marxist theory of the history (Popper and Lakatos think that it is not scientist, but to see Sartre): progress (the monotonous development of the productive forces) is the engine of the history, and science is a superstructure. Just like Popper, it was interested in the criteria of demarcation between science and pseudo-science.

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