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Hasok Chang: Is Water H 2 O? Evidence, Pluralism and Realism, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science

Springer, Dordrecht, 2012, ISBN: 978-94-007-3931-4, 316 pp, price: 149,75 €

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Notes

  1. For a blatant version of such a view see F. J. Rowbotham (1918).

  2. My interpretation of Geoffroy’s table owes much to Ursula Klein (1994) and E. F. Geoffroy’s (1995).

  3. A detailed case for the fact that speculations about atoms by Democritus and the seventeenth-century mechanical philosophers were qualitatively distinct from atomism as it entered science early in the twentieth century is made in Alan Chalmers (2009).

  4. This is argued in detail in op. cit., note 3, Chapter 11.

  5. I analyse Chalmers (2011) argument. It is a response to B. C. van Fraassen (2009).

  6. The accounts of realism and confirmation that I here presume are outlined in the Postscript to the new edition of What Is This Thing Called Science? due to be published in January, 2013.

  7. The extent of Lavoisier’s ‘revolution’ is qualified in this kind of way in Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefèvre (2007).

References

  • Chalmers, A. (2009). The scientist’s atom and the philosopher’s stone. Dordrecht: Springer.

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  • Chalmers, A. (2011). Drawing philosophical lessons from Perrin’s experiments on Brownian motion: A response to van Fraassen. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 62, 711–732.

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  • Geoffroy, E. F. (1995). Table of different “rapports” between different chemical substances—A reinterpretation. Ambix, 42, 72–100.

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  • Klein, U. (1994). Origin of the concept of chemical compound. Science in Context, 7, 163–204.

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  • Klein, U., & Lefèvre, W. (2007). Materials in eighteenth-century science (Chap. 10). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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  • Rowbotham, F. J. (1918). Story lives of great scientists (pp. 27–29). London: Wells, Gardner and Darton.

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  • van Fraassen, B. C. (2009). The perils of Perrin in the hands of philosophers. Philosophical Studies, 143, 5–24.

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  1. Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Alan Chalmers

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  1. Alan Chalmers
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Correspondence to Alan Chalmers.

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Chalmers, A. Hasok Chang: Is Water H 2 O? Evidence, Pluralism and Realism, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Sci & Educ 22, 913–920 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9554-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9554-5

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