Discussion How not to integrate the history and philosophy of science: a reply to Chalmers William R. Newman Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA article info Keywords: Robert Boyle Alan Chalmers Geber Paul of Taranto Daniel Sennert Alchemy Chymistry Mechanical philosophy Reduction to the pristine state abstract Alan Chalmers uses Robert Boyle’s mechanical philosophy as an example of the irrelevance of ‘philoso- phy’ to ‘science’ and criticizes my 2006 book Atoms and alchemy for overemphasizing Boyle’s successes. The present paper responds as follows: first, it argues that Chalmers employs an overly simplistic meth- odology insensitive to the distinction between historical and philosophical claims; second, it shows that the central theses of Atoms and alchemy are untouched by Chalmers’s criticisms; and third, it uses Boyle’s analysis of subordinate causes and his debate with Henry More in the 1670s to demonstrate the inade- quacy of Chalmers’s construal of the mechanical philosophy. Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 1. Introduction: Chalmers’s overall approach Alan Chalmers’s challenge to my 2006 book Atoms and alchemy reflects a broad division between methods in the history and phi- losophy of science that must be addressed before the specific his- torical issues at hand can be fully understood or appreciated. Chalmers’s spirited reaction to my treatment of Robert Boyle in his ‘Newman tried in the fire’ belongs to a much larger agenda on his part concerning the nature of scientific knowledge as a whole, an agenda that I do not share. The following response will accordingly consist of three main parts, in the first of which I will describe the overall theses and methodology that underlie ‘Newman tried in the fire’ and provide the necessary backdrop to Chalmers’s treatment of Boyle. After that, I will present a con- densed version of my own historical reconstruction of the contri- bution that medieval alchemy and early modern chymistry made to atomism, and, finally, I will reply to Chalmers’s attempts to evade previous and ongoing criticisms of his work on Boyle. This tripartite approach will have the advantage of revealing the under- lying causes of our disagreement while also providing specific cases of historical analysis for resolution. The arguments found in ‘Newman tried in the fire’ are mostly condensed from Chalmers’s newly published book, The scientist’s atom and the philosopher’s stone (Chalmers, 2009). There it becomes clear that Chalmers’s concern with Boyle is only a small part of a much broader message. Chalmers is engaged in a comprehensive endeavor to separate ‘philosophical’ from ‘scientific’ matter theo- ries over the longue durée. In attempting this, he develops and im- poses a rigid means of distinguishing the two types of theory. For Chalmers, any matter-theory that does not have independent con- firmation beyond the immediate facts used in framing the theory is only ‘accommodated to the phenomena’ and does not provide ‘sci- entific knowledge’. 1 An accommodationist theory merely fits known data to a new mental blueprint rather than repeatedly surviving se- vere tests and making further predictions that in turn pass tests. At best, Chalmers says, such a theory can provide only philosophy, not science. Needless to say, such a restrictive concept of ‘scientific knowledge’ would present intractable problems even for the work- ing scientists engaged today in high-energy physics, where much re- mains untested; it would also make it hard to count the explanation of physical anomalies as science. For those concerned with the his- tory of science, the problems are equally if not more stultifying, as 0039-3681/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2010.03.002 E-mail address: wnewman@indiana.edu 1 Chalmers (2009), p. 194. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 41 (2010) 203–213 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Studies in History and Philosophy of Science journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa