bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Judgment and Reasoning in the Evaluation of Theories
Authors: Finocchiaro Maurice A.
Published: January 2016

A consensus has recently emerged concerning the role of values in scientific inquiry. The idea that science is value-laden has been elaborated by writers as diverse as Kuhn, McMullin, Hempel, Putnam, Laudan, Feyerabend, Scriven, and Graham.1 Although they all agree that values, value judgment, and evaluation play an important role in science, their emphases and their arguments are different. In fact, I believe that enough work has been done, and enough issues have been raised, that it is becoming increasingly useful and instructive to discuss and explore further the main issues that divide this group of thinkers.

One of these issues is whether it is advisable to treat as a value any type of controversial position, such as belief in God or the thesis of metaphysical materialism; some writers do this, but it is questionable whether it is useful to mix together such disparate items.2
Naturalized Philosophy of Science, History of Science, and the Internal/External Debate
Authors: Paller Bonnie Tamarkin
Published: January 2016

Philosopherd have long stressed a distinction between theory justification and theory discovery based on a belief that justification and discovery are essentially different processes. What makes these two processes essentially different, it was assumed, is that the process of justification is guided by criteria which are expressable as rules, while the processes involved in discovery are not rule-guided. Moreover and perhaps more importantly, it was assumed that tha rules for justification are discoverable a priori by rationalistic logical analysis but an account of discovery, whatever it turns out to be like, will be describable only a posteriori.
The Modal View and Defending Microeconomics
Authors: Rappaport Steven
Published: January 2016

What Daniel Hausman has called “the simple criticism of economic theory”1 is succinctly conveyed by the following passage: “We know full well not only that commodities are not infinitely divisible (which is only intended as a simplification), but businessmen do not always attempt to maximize profits and that the preferences of consumers are not always transitive. ‘Businessmen maximize profits’ and ‘a consumer’s preferences are transitive’ are fundamental economic ‘laws’. How can economists rationally accept a theory which is so full of falsehoods?” (1981a, p. 382). In a recent paper Hausman considers several defenses of neoclassical microeconomics against the simple criticism. One of them is the modal view which Hausman initially characterizes in the, following admittedly vague and ambiguous manner: “Microeconomic general statements are modal (counter-factual) claims.
Null Hypotheses in Ecology: Towards the Dissolution of a Controversy
Authors: Sloep Peter B.
Published: January 2016

In present day ecology, competition is a subject typically generating controversies that pervade the whole field. Ecology is concerned with relations between organisms and their environment. As the environment of any organism has biotic besides physical components, relations between organisms are obviously important. Competition is one of them. According to many ecologists it crucially affects the fate of populations and species. Precisely this assumption has led to vigorous debates (cf. Lewin 1984).

I intend to show that elementary methodological analysis could easily dissolve the controversy. Methodology, indeed, has not always been brought to bear on biology as it should. This point is elaborated at the end of the paper.

Ecologists use a variety of descriptive units, beside individual organisms. Here the population - a group of individual organisms of the same species and the community - a group of populations are of special importance.
Metaphorical Models and Scientific Realism
Authors: Botha M. Elaine
Published: January 2016

The primary significance of the adoption of Black’s (1962) interaction view of metaphor by Hesse in her network model of theories (1966, 1972 and 1974) and in her network model of meanings (1984a) is the fact that it leads to a fundamental modification of the hypothetical-deductive account of scientific theorizing and a relativization of the traditional logical positivist distinction between observation language and theory language. Hesse argues that what holds for metaphorical language in ordinary language use, namely that it is affected by the contextual interaction between the various elements present in the metaphor, is also true of scientific models. They function in a similar fashion (1972, p. 254). She does not reject the distinction between literal and metaphorical language, but claims that the distinction is a pragmatic one. The distinction concerns the way in which speakers learn, use, and if necessary, define the words of their language.
Fitness As a Function
Authors: Byerly Henry
Published: January 2016

Recent attempts to clarify the fitness in evolutionary theory as a propensity (Brandon 1978; Brandon and Beatty 1984; Burian 1983; Mills and Beatty 1979; Sober 1984a, 1984b) or as a primitive theoretical term (Rosenberg 1983, 1985; Williams 1970, Williams and Rosenberg 1985) all miss the mark in clarifying the empirical content and explanatory power of natural selection theory.

I shall argue that the crucial distinction missing in these accounts is between the sense of fitness common in population genetics as actual relative rate of increase of genotypes and fitness in the more ordinary sense--and Darwin’s--of adaptedness of organisms. The relation between these senses of ‘fitness’ is that fitness as actual reproduction success depends on, is a function of, variables representing adaptive capacities and environmental properties.
Methodology's Prospects
Authors: Laudan Larry
Published: January 2016

Ever since Aristotle, the philosophy of science has had two clearly delineated components: (a) conceptual foundations and (b) methodology. These rather closely correspond to what one might call the metaphysical and the epistemic bases of scientific knowledge. Both branches of philosophy of science have co-existed for a long time. If anything, methodology has usually tended to predominate over foundations.

Recently, however, methodology has come onto hard times and, since the 1960s especially, it has come in for considerable abuse. Some of that abuse is doubtless well-deserved. Much of traditional methodology made assumptions about the nature of scientific inference which simply cannot be sustained.
From Methodology to Dialectics: A post-Cartesian Approach to Scientific Rationality
Authors: Pera Marcello
Published: January 2016

The problem of scientific rationality is one of the most controversial in the contemporary philosophy of science. If I am so foolhardy as to raise it again, it is because I do not feel comfortable with most present-day solutions and because I hope I may suggest a more promising, although still tentative, line of research.

In order to illustrate the particular angle from which I intend to deal with this problem, I shall make use of the words of a great cosmologist, Fred Hoyle, and I shall also refer to the current debate in cosmology. What I have to say, however, is intended to apply to science in general and not only to a single discipline or to a specific episode.
The Pragmatics of Observation
Authors: Creath Richard
Published: January 2016

My eyes are notoriously bad, so I am not sure whether I have ever seen a meteor. Others have seen them, of course, but it is important to me to observe them first hand. I even go to the trouble to hike at night in the desert mountains so that viewing conditions will be ideal. I scan the sky through my thick glasses, but to no avail. My companions have sighted several, the latest just to the left of that peak. And still I am unsure. Did I really see the meteor, or was it just that my eye twitched? I suspect that this question has no unambiguous answer and that understanding why it lacks such an answer will provide important clues about the role of observation in scientific theorizing.
Reduction and Realism
Authors: Morrison Margaret
Published: January 2016

In his recent book Foundations of Space-Time Theories Michael Friedman argues for a realism about theoretical structure based on specific methodological practices concerning theory unification. Theoretical structures that are essential to the unifying process are to be given a literal realistic interpretation while the remaining ones can be considered as having merely representational status. Friedman’s account of unification involves the notion of a literal reduction or identification of observational properties of entities or objects with their theoretical counterparts. The relationship between these two levels of theory can be construed as that of submodel to model. Once the appropriate reductions are achieved we are then free to conjoin certain theoretical structures with others thereby enabling us, over time, to produce a unified theory encompassing a variety of domains.

The alternative to this view Friedman describes as the representationalist approach. Instead of characterizing the relationship between observational and theoretical structures as that of submodel to model the observational properties are simply correlated by way of an embedding (as opposed to an identity) map with their appropriate theoretical counterparts.
Causal Explanation in Laboratory Ecology: The Case of Competitive Indeterminacy
Authors: Griesemer James R.
Published: January 2016

In this paper I contrast two causal explanations of the outcome of a set of laboratory experiments in population ecology conducted by Thomas Park in the 1940s and 1950s. These experiments shed light on the problem of adducing evidence for the operation of competition (see Lloyd 1987 for a recent philosophical discussion) and are central to the group selection controversy because they form the empirical base for experimental studies of group selection conducted over the last 12 years (see Griesemer and Wade 1988 for an analysis).

The experiments investigated competition in laboratory populations of two flour beetle species, Tribolium confusum and Tribolium castaneum, but the results were more complex and interesting than expected; in addition to demonstrating competition in a laboratory system, they exhibited what Park called “competitive indeterminacy.” This phenomenon was of great interest to statisticians, who devised stochastic models to describe its demographic basis (e.g., M.S. Bartlett, P.H. Leslie, and J. Neyman; see Mertz 1972 for references).
Multiple Constraints, Simultaneous Solutions
Authors: Galison Peter
Published: January 2016

Historians and philosophers of science have, of late, found a new common ground. During the 1960s the two fields worked together to answer the general question: “how does one theory supersede another?” — followed immediately by a second query: “Is the process rational?” Historians provided examples from the chronicles of science, and philosophers tested these cases against universal models of change. Together the two helped ground an important avenue of inquiry, and today the best of that work — by Feyerabend, Kuhn, Lakatos, Popper, and others — forms a staple of the philosophy of science.

But despite the best of intentions, in the 1970s the two fields began to pull apart centrifugally. On one side, the philosophers found their concerns concentrated ever more on fundamental issues about meaning and reference, and these seemed to demand idealized histories with simpler structures.
Scientific Realism in Real Science
Authors: Jones Roger
Published: January 2016

Scientific realism is a doctrine about the relationship of our ideas on the nature of things to the nature of things itself. Part of the doctrine is that there is a nature of things itself. With regard to the rest, Jarrett Leplin has said, “Like the Equal Rights Movement, scientific realism is a majority position whose advocates are so divided as to appear a minority” (Leplin 1984, p. 1). Still, it can be said that what realists would like is that the account of the nature of things provided by science be true and that those things really exist.

Characterized in this way, realism would seem to be a majority position indeed. As Ernst Mach has said of the doctrine,

It has arisen in the process of immeasurable time without the intentional assistance of man. It is a product of nature, and is preserved by nature. Everything that philosophy has accomplished…is, as compared with it, but an insignificant and ephemeral product of art. The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation…, immediately returns [to realism]. (Mach 1959, p. 37, quoted in Fine 1986, p. 134)
Decisions, Games and Equilibrium Solutions
Authors: Harper William
Published: January 2016

Von Neumann and Morgenstern based their theory of games on the representation of individual preferences for outcomes by utilities generated by preferences for gambles over these outcomes. A utility function (an assignment of numbers to outcomes) represents an agent's preferences just in case the agent's preference relation between any two gambles agrees with the numerical relation between their expected utilities (where these expectations are calculated using the objective probabilities specified in the gambles). This representation constrains the utility assignments up to scale transformations (multiplying each value by the same positive number) and adjustments of the zero point (adding the same positive or negative number to each value). This fixes the ratios of differences between utilities of outcomes.

Von Neumann and Morgenstem proposed qualitative constraints on the agent's preferences among these gambles which are equivalent to the assertion that such a utility representation exists. Here is an equivalent formulation of such rationality postulates.
Risk Assessment and Uncertainty
Authors: Shrader-Frechette Kristin
Published: January 2016

Risk assessments done by the Ford Foundation-Mitre Corporation and the Union of Concerned Scientists agree on the hazard probabilities and consequences associated with commercial nuclear fission, but make opposed recommendations regarding using atomic energy to generate electricity. The UCS risk analysis decided against use of the technology; the Ford-Mitre study advised in favor of it (Union of Concerned Scientists 1977; Nuclear Energy Policy Study Group 1977; Cooke 1982, p. 334).

The two studies agreed on the data but made different policy recommendations because they followed different methodological rules at the third, risk-evaluation, stage of assessment. (The first two stages are risk identification and risk estimation.) The Ford-Mitre research was based on the widely accepted Bayesian decision criterion that it is rational to choose the action with the best expected value or utility, where ‘expected value’ or ‘expected utility’ is defined as the weighted sum of all possible consequences of the action, and where the weights are given by the probability associated with each consequence.
The Phenotype as the Level of Selection: Cave Organisms as Model Systems
Authors: Kane Thomas C. , Richardson Robert C. , Fong Daniel W.
Published: January 2016

Selection operates at many levels. Some of the most obvious cases are organismic, such as changes in coloration under the influence of predation (cf. Kettlewell 1973; also Endler 1986). It also operates at other levels. Meiotic drive involves selection for a gene, independently of its effect on the organism. At a higher level, there may also be selection for patterns of colony growth in social insects, again under the influence of predation (cf. Wilson 1971). The appropriate level of selection is a matter of the causal patterns exhibited, or the target of selection. It can also be understood as a question of the appropriate level at which to seek explanatory laws.

Robert Brandon (1982, 1990) first clearly distinguished the question of the level of selection from debates over the units of selection. In doing so, he argued that the phenotype is commonly the target of selection, whatever the unit of selection might be.
The Explanatory Tools of Theoretical Population Biology
Authors: Cooper Gregory
Published: January 2016

There is, at present, controversy surrounding the role of the mathematical models which typify the more theoretical portions of ecology and evolutionary biology. Within these sciences there has been controversy about the “testability” of these models, both in terms of the ability of the model to make precise enough claims about the world, and in terms of our ability to determine the values of theoretical parameters. There has been concern, particularly in ecology, about the lack of realism characteristic of most models as well. These are, for the most part, issues involving the nature of theoretical explanation. Much of the current debate about null hypothesis testing, the unfalsifiability of theory, and the role of theory is symptomatic, it would seem, of the fact that these sciences have not settled on what to expect from their most mathematical theories. If there is one emerging theme, it is the need, again especially in ecology, for pluralistic theoretical treatments - which suggests that they may have been expecting too much.
The Infinite Apparatus in the Quantum Theory of Measurement
Authors: Robinson Don
Published: January 2016

It has been suggested that the measuring apparatus used to measure quantum systems ought to be idealized as consisting of an infinite number of quantum systems. Let us call this the infinity assumption. The suggestion that we ought to make the infinity assumption has been made in connection with two closely related but distinct problems. One is the problem of determining the importance of the limitations on measurement incorporated into the Wigner-Araki-Yanase quantum theory of measurement. The other is the measurement problem. These problems are not internal to the quantum mechanical formalism. They arise when we obtain particular formal results in applying the quantum mechanical formalism to measurement interactions. The formal results are problematic because they resist explanation. Various authors have claimed that by making the infinity assumption we can neglect the limitations on measurement. Bub (1988) and (1989) claims it allows us to solve the measurement problem. I will argue that both claims are unjustified.
Interpreting State Reduction from the Practices-up
Authors: Cordero Alberto
Published: January 2016

The search for a coherent and fertile interpretation of quantum mechanics [QM] with collapse of the wave function is currently a hot topic. This paper focuses on the following sets of related issues: 1) In what sense, if any, do collapse theories constitute a view of the quantum world induced “from the practices-up”? [Here and throughout the paper the term “a view from the practices-up” will mean a view induced from the practices of scientists working on specific problems.] 2) What general description does a collapse variant of QM yield of the physical world? What interpretative problems, if any, does it solve? How exactly does it differ from current mainstream versions of QM? What problems does it face? How serious are these problems in light of current background knowledge?. 3) In our present scientific and philosophical circumstances, what, if anything, makes the search for collapse theories an attractive program?
Time-travel and Topology
Authors: Maudlin Tim
Published: January 2016

Is time-travel possible? Like most intriguing problems that lie within the shared locus of physics, metaphysics and logic, this question admits of many interpretations, each of which engenders a different line of research. At its most anemic, the issue can be just: Is it possible to tell a story about travel into the past that contains no explicit contradictions? Under the stimulation of physical concerns it may develop into a more challenging problem: Do the laws of physics, as best we understand them, admit of solutions that contain closed time-like curves? And next: Would it be physically possible for a massive object to travel along one of those curves into its own local past? Then: Are the known facts about our universe consistent with it being such a world? And finally: Is time-travel in our universe technologically possible? When prodded in this direction our original question arrives at last on the drawing boards of the engineers, having passed successively through the precincts of the theoretical physicists, the mathematicians, and the astronomers.
Visual Perception and the Wages of Indeterminacy
Authors: Montgomery Richard
Published: January 2016

In Word and Object, W.V. Quine made thinkable the idea that speech and cognition bear a burden of semantic indeterminacy. On Quine’s account, the upshot of semantic indeterminacy is that meaning and mentalism resist successful naturalization, and thus fail the test of scientific respectibility. For Quine, semantic indeterminacy is a fatal shortcoming.

Recent attempts to naturalize meaning in our thought and our talk (e.g. Dretske 1981, Fodor 1987), belonging to a tradition that has thrived in reaction to Quine, have sought to nail down semantic properties in a scientifically respectable fashion, avoiding the scourge of indeterminacy. However, both Quine and the new redeemers of mentalism may have missed the boat. Three case studies offered here will suggest that a thriving theory of visual perception still makes room for some rather striking indeterminacies.
Theory Pursuit: Between Discovery and Acceptance
Authors: Whitt Laurie Anne
Published: January 2016

Scientists typically do something other than accept or reject their theories, they pursue them. Throughout the greater part of the nineteenth century numerous chemists devoted their research energy and resources to the development of Daltonian theory, declaring themselves willing to make use of the atomic theory in their research but reluctant or unwilling to accept it. When Frankland, for example, declared that he did not want to be considered a “blind believer” in the atomic theory and could not “accept it as true”, but that he had been—and planned to continue—using it “as a useful ladder”, he had arrived at a decision shared by many of his colleagues that while the theory was not acceptable, it was promising and worthy of pursuit.1 And when Van’t Hoff measured the kinetic-molecular theory by its fruits in the 1880’s, he judged that it barely gave the then-current 4% interest rate, and so was an unpromising theory, unworthy of pursuit (van Nelsen 1960. p. 151).
Conditional Probabilities, Conditionalization, and Dutch Books
Authors: Sobel Jordan Howard
Published: January 2016

Relations between conditional probabilities, revisions of probabilities in the light of new information, and conditions of ideal rationality are discussed herein. The formal character of conditional probabilities, and their significance for epistemic states of agents is taken up. Then principles are considered that would, under certain conditions, equate rationally revised probabilities on new information with probabilities reached by conditionalizing on this information. And lastly the possibility of kinds of ‘books’ against known non-conditionalizers is explored, and the question is taken up, What, if anything, would be wrong with a person against whom such a book could be made?

1. The standard mathematical treatment takes probability functions as basic, and conditional probabilities defined. If P(-) is a probability function, then is its conditional probability function if and only if P(h/e) is defined only for e such that P(e) > 0, and is then equal to P(e & h)/P(e).
II. Elements of Physical Reality, Nonlocality and Stochasticity in Relativistic Dynamical Reduction Models
Authors: Ghirardi GianCarlo , Pearle Philip
Published: January 2016

In this part we will consider recent attempts to get a relativistic CSL theory. The problem of getting such a generalization, or at least of making plausible that it exists, is of great interest. J. Bell (1990), after having expressed his dissatisfaction with the fundamental lack of precision of the standard formulation of quantum mechanics and the opinion that the only available acceptable alternatives are the Pilot Wave and the Spontaneous Localization schemes has stated: The big question, in my opinion, is which, if either, of these two precise pictures can be redeveloped in a Lorentz invariant way. The point of view of this paper is that what is most interesting is not a detailed exposition of the formal aspects of the generalization, but some crucial conceptual points which have come into focus in this attempt.
The Function of Credit in Hull's Evolutionary Model of Science
Authors: Koertge Noretta
Published: January 2016

David Hull’s book (1988) provides an evolutionary account of the development of science which pays attention to both the social and conceptual aspects of that process. Unlike most philosophers who only invoke Darwinian metaphors in a casual way, Hull takes the analogy between the biological evolution of species and the growth of scientific knowledge quite seriously and by providing abstract definitions of terms such as replicator, interactor and lineage, he makes it possible for us to see clearly the structural similarities between the two historical processes.

Other symposiasts will comment on how tight that analogy really is. I must remark in passing that I have never understood the intense interest which evolutionary epistemologists take in this comparison. Surely our major job is to understand how science works, perhaps by using evolutionary theory as a fallible heuristic, but nothing seems to hinge on the extent of the formal analogy.
Giving up Certainties
Authors: Kyburg Henry E.
Published: January 2016

People have worried for many years — centuries — about how you perform large changes in your body of beliefs. How does the new evidence lead you to replace a geocentric system of planetary motion by a heliocentric system? How do we decide to abandon the principle of the conservation of mass?

The general approach that we will try to defend here is that an assumption, presupposition, framework principle, will be rejected or altered when a large enough number of improbabilities must be accepted on be basis of our experience. If I think that all swans are white, and a student claims to have a counterexample, I will assume that he has made some observational error. I will reject his result, and continue to accept the generalization. When a lot of people claim to have seen counterexamples, I will come around: to continue to accept the generalization would require me to accept too many improbabilities.
Between Mathematics and Physics
Authors: Resnik Michael D.
Published: January 2016

The distinction between mathematical and physical objects has probably played a greater role shaping the philosophy of mathematics than the distinction between observable and theoretical entities has had in defining the philosophy of science. All the major movements in the philosophy of mathematics may be seen as attempts to free mathematics of an abstract ontology or to come to terms with it. The reasons are epistemic. Most philosophers of mathematics believe that the abstractaess of mathematical objects introduces special difficulties in accounting for our ability to know them, to refer to them and even to entertain beliefs about them. These difficulties—supposedly absent even in the case of the most theoretical physical objects—make mathematical objects especially problematic and philosophically unattractive.

Few have questioned this epistemic thesis or the ontic distinction it presupposes. LaVerne Shelton (1980) challenged the abstract-concrete distinction some years ago in an unpublished APA address.
Structuralism and Conceptual Change in Mathematics
Authors: Menzel Christopher
Published: January 2016

Professor Grosholz packs a lot into her interesting and suggestive paper “Formal Unities and Real Individuals” (Grosholz 1990b). In the limited space available I can comment briefly on its several parts, or direct more substantive comments at a single issue. I will opt for the latter; specifically, I want to address her critique of mathematical structuralism, as found especially in the writings of Michael Resnik.

I begin with a brief, hence necessarily caricatured, summary of Resnik’s influential view. According to structuralism, the subject matter of a mathematical theory is a given pattern, or structure, and the objects of the theory are intrinsically unstructured points, or positions, within that pattern. Mathematical objects thus have no identity, and no intrinsic features, outside of the patterns in which they occur. Hence, they cannot be given in isolation but only in their role within an antecedently given pattern, and are distinguishable from one another only in virtue of the relations they bear to one another in the pattern (see, e.g., Resnik (1981)).
Implications of the Cognitive Sciences for the Philosophy of Science
Authors: Giere Ronald N.
Published: January 2016

Does recent work in the cognitive sciences have any implications for theories or methods employed within the philosophy of science itself? The answer to this question depends first on one’s conception of the philosophy of science and then on the nature of work being done in the various different fields comprising the cognitive sciences. For example, one might think of the philosophy of science as being an autonomous discipline that is both logically and epistemologically prior to any empirical inquiry. If the cognitive sciences are empirical sciences, then research in the cognitive sciences could not have any significant implications for the philosophy of science. And that would be the end of the matter. Logical Empiricism is now typically understood as having exemplified this point of view.

More specifically, Logical Empiricism took it for granted (i) that scientific knowledge should be understood as ideally having the structure of a formal logical calculus, and (ii) that the empirical warrant for scientific claims is given by directly observed data together with formal rules which determine the weight of the evidence for or against the particular claims in question.
Allan Franklin, Right or Wrong
Authors: Ackermann Robert
Published: January 2016

I regret to inform you that Allan Franklin is unable to be here because of the consequences of his collision with a truck in Boulder, Colorado several weeks ago. The three of us have decided to proceed with the symposium in his honor, even though it is now missing its fulcrum. The original point of the symposium was to have an informed discussion of two versions of atomic parity-violation experiments, versions that embody opposed philosophical conceptions of the experiments. The first conception is embodied in Andy Pickering’s account in his Constructing Quarks, an account that is explicitly criticized by Allan Franklin’s more recent discussion in his Experiment, right or wrong (Pickering 1984; Franklin 1990). The symposium would have brought this confrontation into focus, with Franklin’s presentation of his critique followed by Pickering’s rejoinder at this symposium, both of them in sufficient command of the detailed history of the atomic parity-violation experiments to allow for the possibility of a useful exchange of differences of opinion.
Computer Simulations
Authors: Humphreys Paul
Published: January 2016

A great deal of attention has been paid by philosophers to the use of computers in the modelling of human cognitive capacities and in the construction of intelligent artifacts. This emphasis has tended to obscure the fact that most of the high-level computing power in science is deployed in what appears to be a much less exciting activity: solving equations. This apparently mundane set of applications reflects the historical origins of modem computing, in the sense that most of the early computers in Britain and the U.S. were devices built to numerically attack mathematical problems that were hard, if not impossible, to solve non-numerically, especially in the areas of ballistics and fluid dynamics. The latter area was especially important for the development of atomic weapons at Los Alamos, and it is still true that a large portion of the supercomputing capacity of the United States is concentrated at weapons development laboratories such as Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore.
Determinism in Deterministic Chaos
Authors: Jones Roger
Published: January 2016

In a paper fifteen years ago about the meaning and the possibility of the beginning and end of time, our redoubtable session chair, John Earman, ended up like this:

…[T]he answers to the questions posed at the outset lie somewhere in a thicket of problems growing out of the intersection of mathematics, physics, and metaphysics. This paper has only located the thicket and engaged in a little initial bush beating. This is not much progress, but knowing which bushes to beat is a necessary first step.

Some philosophers will be disappointed that the thicket is populated by so many problems of a technical and scientific nature. On the contrary, I am encouraged by this result because it shows that a long-standing philosophical problem has a nontrivial and, indeed, a surprisingly large content. Moreover, this result is a good illustration of the artificiality and danger of trying to separate philosophy from science. (Earman 1977, p. 131-2)

These remarks are a kind of manifesto of an approach to philosophical questions about space and time dating from the late 1960’s.
Objects and Structures in the Formal Sciences
Authors: Grosholz Emily
Published: January 2016

The priority of mathematics in the construction and deployment of the physical sciences has recently come under attack. Empiricism in the philosophy of mathematics, an offshoot of the trend towards naturalized epistemologies, subordinates formal disciplines to empirical facts (conceived variously as experience or experiment). (Kitcher 1983 and Maddy 1991) When allied with structuralism (Chihara 1973 and Resnik 1981,1982,1990), which denies to mathematics any specific subject matter of its own, it displaces intelligibility, heuristic force, and explanatory power away from mathematics into the realm of “fact”.

In this essay, I will argue that mathematics, and mechanics conceived as a formal science, do have their own proper subject matters, their own proper unities.
Adding Potential to a Physical Theory of Causation
Authors: Zangari Mark
Published: January 2016

Recently, several authors have attempted to characterise causation by identifying causal connections with physical processes. While this approach may not live up to providing a complete analysis of causation in all its contexts, it has raised some significant points regarding the causal role played by various entities described in natural laws. To date, much of the discussion has involved the attempted identification of physical terms or concepts that necessarily or sufficiently characterise causal processes, and has centered around three main contentions:

Cl.

Causal processes involve the presence of forces, and that forces are themselves a species of primitive causes (e.g., Bigelow, et al. 1988).

C2.

Causal processes necessarily involve transfer of a physically measurable quantity, such as energy-momentum (e.g., Aronson 1982 and Fair 1979).

C3.

Causal processes necessarily involve microscopic interactions between “fundamental” entities, such as is described by quantum field theory (e.g., Heathcote 1989).
A Defense of Propensity Interpretations of Fitness
Authors: Richardson Robert C. , Burian Richard M.
Published: January 2016

That there was some chance element to evolutionary change was clear even to Darwin (cf. Hodge 1987; also Hodge & Kohn 1986), but chance has assumed a more central role in evolutionary theory since the early decades of this century. It was certainly clear to theoreticians such as Dobzhansky, Wright and Fisher that an adequate evolutionary theory would have to take a stochastic form, though they disagreed as to the significance of chance in evolution (Gigerenzer et al., 1989, ch. 4; Turner 1987). As Beatty explains, the central difference is that in more modern treatments, not only is the origin of variations a matter of chance, their evolutionary fates are also matters of chance (Beatty 1984; cf. Beatty 1987). Probabilistic theories of evolutionary change, as we shall be concerned with them, emphasize this dependency of evolutionary fates on chance, and treat evolutionary change as irreducibly probabilistic.
Bell’s Inequality, Information Transmission, and Prism Models
Authors: Maudlin Tim
Published: January 2016

Suppose we set about creating pairs of photons in the singlet state, allow them to separate to some considerable distance, and then send each photon into a polarizer oriented at some randomly chosen angle. Quantum theory predicts that in the long run we will observe the following behavior. On each wing of the experiment we will see perfectly random behavior. Roughly half of the photons will pass their polarizers and half will be absorbed. There will be no correlation between passage or absorption in one experiment and passage or absorption in the succeeding experiments. There will be no correlation between the passage or absorption and the angle at which the polarizer is set. But when we examine the correlations between the two wings of the experiment, something remarkable emerges.
What Price Neurophilosophy ?
Authors: Saidel Eric
Published: January 2016

If the appropriate cognitive model of the mind is a connectionist model, then what does the future of folk psychology (FP) look like? “Bleak” say the eliminative materialists. In several recent articles and books Paul and Patricia Churchland have been arguing by demonstration that there are models on which to explain all behavior—not merely cognitive behavior—models which are more fruitful than FP. These models, which are connectionist in nature, are supposed to describe a better theory of behavior than FP, and so will eventually replace it. In this paper I look at several arguments the Churchlands have advanced for the thesis that FP will be replaced in a mature cognitive science, i.e., that connectionism will supplant FP.
Realism, Convergence, and Additivity
Authors: Juhl Cory , Kelly Kevin T.
Published: January 2016

In one version of the debate between scepticism and scientific realism,
the sceptic denies and the realist affirms the ability of science to home in
on the unknown truth. Germane to this debate is the familiar claim that
probabilistic updating by Bayesian conditionalization will almost surely
arrive at the truth so long as one does not “close the door” on a hypothesis
by assigning it probability zero. In this paper, we observe, on behalf of
the sceptic, that there exists a coherent agent who in fact
fails on an
uncountable set of possible worlds to find
the truth about a simple, universal hypothesis H even though he “keeps the
door open” concerning H until H is logically refuted and even though there
is a trivial, logically driven method that converges to the truth about H no
matter what; that nonetheless, this agent “almost surely” arrives at the
truth in the usual, Bayesian sense because the uncountable set of
circumstances in which he fails is assigned probability zero by the agent;
and that the guarantee that the set of all circumstances in which the agent
fails has probability zero hinges on the axiom of countable
additivity.
The Extent of Dilation of Sets of Probabilities and the Asymptotics of Robust Bayesian Inference
Authors: Herron Timothy , Seidenfeld Teddy , Wasserman Larry
Published: January 2016

We discuss two general issues concerning diverging sets of Bayesian (conditional) probabilities—divergence of “posteriors”—that can result with increasing evidence. Consider a setof probabilities typically, but not always, based on a set of Bayesian “priors.” Incorporating sets of probabilities, rather than relying on a single probability, is a useful way to provide a rigorous mathematical framework for studying sensitivity and robustness in Classical and Bayesian inference. See: Berger (1984, 1985, 1990); Lavine (1991); Huber and Strassen (1973); Walley (1991); and Wasserman and Kadane (1990). Also, sets of probabilities arise in group decision problems. See: Levi (1982); and Seidenfeld, Kadane, and Schervish (1989). Third, sets of probabilities are one consequence of weakening traditional axioms for uncertainty. See: Good (1952); Smith (1961); Kyburg (1961); Levi (1974); Fishburn (1986); Seidenfeld, Schervish, and Kadane (1990); and Walley (1991).
The Microeconomic Interpretation of Games
Authors: LaCasse Chantale , Ross Don
Published: January 2016

It is clear that many philosophers of science are inclined to be
sceptical about the scientific ambitions of economics. Sometimes this
scepticism amounts to a forthright denial of economists’ entitlement to be
granted the epistemic authority normally claimed by scientists (for example,
Dupré 1993). A more modest ambivalence may be signalled by a philosopher's
refusal to treat the intuitions of economists as
data for the philosophy of science, in the
way that (e.g.) physicists’ ontological and epistemological judgements are
now routinely treated. The following paper is part of a much larger project
that criticizes the basis for this scepticism, at least where microeconomics
is concerned. This general project is partly motivated by our belief that
philosophers have often viewed microeconomics from a highly distorting set
of perspectives. One source of these distortions is a sociological accident:
the philosophy of economics, as a part of the philosophy of science, has
been largely owned since its outset by Popperians and their intellectual
descendants.
Philosophy of Psychology as Philosophy of Science
Authors: Hatfield Gary
Published: January 2016

The spirit of the papers that follow, reflecting the title of the original symposium, is to treat the philosophy of psychology as a branch of the philosophy of science. As such, philosophy of psychology is to be conceived on a parallel with philosophy of physics and philosophy of biology, as an instance of the “philosophy of the special sciences.” The philosophy of the special sciences treats each of the sciences as potentially having its own explanatory structures, conceptual problems, and evidentiary relations, which may be more or less similar to those once discussed under “general philosophy of science,” with its typical reliance on examples from physics. In this connection, work in the philosophy of psychology over the past two decades has analyzed the structure of psychological explanations (Cummins 1983; Hardcastle 1992; Haugeland 1978), has examined the conceptual issues attending such notions as that of representation (Dretske 1981; Hatfield 1988b; Lloyd 1989; Shapiro 1993) or qualitative experiential content (Dennett 1991; Hardin 1988), and has examined the theoretical structure and explanatory possibilities of the new connectionism (Horgan and Tienson 1991; Ramsey et al. 1991).
A Dissolution of the Problem of Locality
Authors: Saunders Simon
Published: January 2016

Relativistic quantum theory poses a number of conceptual problems over and above the non-relativistic mechanics. From a purely mathematical point of view it is also much more sophisticated. Even the kinematic theory poses considerable difficulties: locality, antimatter, negative energy, and charge are already systematically linked in ways that cannot simply be paraphrased. A further complication is that in the midst of this structure we have what is usually called the Newton-Wigner representation (or, in the case of the Dirac theory, the Foldy-Wouthuysen representation), in which fields and states are no longer covariantly described and where the “local” self-adjoint quantities (NW-local observables) do not obey microcausality, but only satisfy equal-time commutators with respect to a particular inertial frame. If we pass to this represenation, we obtain at a stroke the basic structure of non-relativistic quantum field theory; it is not too hard to descend from that to a many-particle mechanics, and to recover the usual definitions of localization.
Dynamics of Theory Change: The Role of Predictions
Authors: Brush Stephen G.
Published: January 2016

“What did the President know and when did he know it?”

Senator Howard Baker, Watergate hearings, 1973

Why do scientists accept or reject theories? More specifically: why do they change from one theory to another? What is the role of empirical tests in the evaluation of theories?

This paper focuses on a narrowly-defined question: in judging theories, do scientists give greater weight (other things being equal) to successfulnovel predictionsthan to successful deductions of previously-known facts? The affirmative answer is called the “predictivist thesis” (Maher 1988).

It is primarily philosophers who are interested in this question, and they have treated it mostly as a normative or logical problem. Can the writings of historians of science tell us how scientists have treated novel predictions in the past? Until recently historians have rarely addressed this point.
Interactions Among Theory, Experiment, and Technology in Molecular Biology
Authors: Schaffner Kenneth F.
Published: January 2016

In this paper, I revisit a problem in immunology and molecular genetics that I had first tried to understand some philosophical implications of over twenty years ago. At that time, some immunologists such as Mel Cohn at the Salk Institute, referred to it as the GOD problem, which was the acronym forGeneratorOfDiversity (also see Cohn's more recent discussion in his 1994, 41-48). In the early 1970s there were three or four different theories that had been proposed to account for the way in which antibody diversity is generated and considerable argument among the proponents of the different approaches to the problem (see Cohn, 1994). In 1971-72 I attempted to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the competing theories of antibody diversity from the perspective of a “logic of comparative theory evaluation” that had seemed to work reasonably well in physics (Schaffner, 1970), and I drafted an essay that ultimately sided with one of those theories (somatic mutation).
Engaging Science Through Cultural Studies
Authors: Rouse Joseph
Published: January 2016

In this paper I sketch the project undertaken in my forthcoming book, Engaging Science (Rouse, 1995). This sketch inevitably sacrifices detail and argument, but I hope there is a commensurate gain from giving a sense of how the various aspects of the project hang together. The project itself has two parts: first, a criticism or what I call the “legitimation project” in philosophy and sociology of science; second, my treatment of some of the philosophical issues raised by an alternative approach to interdisciplinary science studies that I call cultural studies of science. I discuss the legitimation project only briefly, however, to set the stage for a discussion of the constructive alternative.

The legitimation project is characterized by the belief that the epistemic standing and the cultural authority of the sciences are in need of a general justification, and that what can appropriately provide such justification (or show its impossibility) is to ascertain the general aim of the sciences as such, or the general nature of science as a practice or achievement.