bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Four Basic Concepts of Medical Science
Authors: Whitbeck Caroline
Published: January 2016

It might be thought that the basic concept in medical science is that of health. However, as it turns out, medicine has little or nothing to say about health. (This is less true of some of the other health sciences and health professions, notably nursing and public health.) Instead it is diseases, injuries, impairments, and, to a lesser extent, symptoms which are the focus of concern in medicine. It is a generally recognized and frequently bemoaned fact that in this country, contemporary medicine and medical education largely ignore, not only the promotion of health, but even the prevention of disease and injury. (Medical educators are among those most acutely aware of this situation.) Instead, medicine is principally concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of medical crisis.

It is small wonder that in explicating the concept of health as it is found in the theories which inform the practice of medicine, Boorse arrives at a negative notion, viz., health as the absence of disease and injury.
Why Astrology is a Pseudoscience
Authors: Thagard Paul R.
Published: January 2016

Most philosophers and historians of science agree that astrology is a pseudoscience, but there is little agreement on why it is a pseudoscience. Answers range from matters of verifiability and falsifiability, to questions of progress and Kuhnian normal science, to the different sorts of objections raised by a large panel of scientists recently organized by The Humanist magazine. Of course there are also Feyerabendian anarchists and others who say that no demarcation of science from pseudoscience is possible. However, I shall propose a complex criterion for distinguishing disciplines as pseudoscientific; this criterion is unlike verificationist and falsificationist attempts in that it introduces social and historical features as well as logical ones.

I begin with a brief description of astrology. It would be most unfair to evaluate astrology by reference to the daily horoscopes found in newspapers and popular magazines.
Randomness and Reality
Authors: Hellman Geoffrey
Published: January 2016

In previous technical work ([1] and [2]) on which his present paper [3] draws, Benioff has presented results conforming with the following argument-scheme:

First, if we construe Quantum Mechanics as making claims to the effect that infinite outcome sequences (generated by repeated measurements on a system for a given observable in a given state) be random; and second, if a strong definition of “random” is adopted in this construal, then certain models of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZF) cannot be “carriers for the mathematics of physics”.

How interesting is this? One can approach the matter on two levels, the level of the specific technical results, and the level of more general implications of this pattern of argument for understanding connections between mathematics and physics. The second more general level should be our primary focus, but it will pay at the outset to look briefly at the technical level.
The Principles of Biological Classification: The Use and Abuse of Philosophy
Authors: Hull David L.
Published: January 2016

In recent years two groups of taxonomists have attempted to influence the general goals and methods of biological classification. The first group, which emerged in the late 1950’s, has been called variously neo-Adansonian, numerical, computer and phenetic taxonomy. The founders of this school, Robert R. Sokal and P.H.A. Sneath, termed their unified approach to systematics “neo-Adansonian” because of the affinities which they saw between their views and those of the 18th century botanist, Michel Adanson (1727-1806). Today little mention is made of Adanson. His ideas turned out not to be as prescient as Sokal and Sneath had at first thought. Besides, he had served his purpose as a patron saint ([79], p. 23). Sokal and Sneath also termed their approach “numerical” because they believed that taxonomists should make greater use of available mathematical techniques. Not only should taxonomic characters be coded quantitatively but also estimates of affinity should be made on the basis of explicitly stated clustering procedures.
History and Evolution: On the Changing Relation of Theory to Practice in the Work of Jürgen Habermas
Authors: McCarthy Thomas
Published: January 2016

The relation of theory to practice has been a persistent concern of Marxist thought, so much so, in fact, that this type of acute self-consciousness might be regarded as one of its constitutive features. Thus in his introduction to the 1971 edition of Theory and Practice, Jürgen Habermas offers the following characterization of critical theory:

The theory specifies the conditions under which a self-reflection of the species has become objectively possible. At the same time it names those to whom the theory is addressed, who can with its help gain enlightenment about themselves and their emancipatory role in the process of history. With this reflection on the context of its origin and this anticipation of the context of its application, the theory understands itself as a necessary catalytic moment of the very complex of social life that it analyses; and it analyzes this complex as an integral network of coercion, from the viewpoint of its possible transformation.
Dissonance and Consistency according to Shackle and Shafer
Authors: Levi Isaac
Published: January 2016

R.A.Fisher introduced the fiducial argument as a means for obtaining something from nothing. He thought that on some occasions it was legitimate to obtain a posterior probability distribution over a range of simple statistical hypotheses without commitment to a prior distribution [4].

H.Jeffreys thought he could tame Fisher by casting his argument in a Bayesian mold through a derivation of the fiducial posterior from a suitably constructed ignorance prior via Bayes’ theorem and conditionalization on the data of experimentation. According to Jeffreys, Fisher was using something to obtain something after all ([7],pp.381-383).

D.V.Lindley furthered the process of taming by specifying allegedly necessary and sufficient conditions for the consistency of fiducial reasoning in contexts of one parameter estimation with Bayesian requirements [14]. I. Hacking exploited Lindley’s result to supply his own ingenious method for taming Fisher([5],ch. 9).

T.Seidenfeld has recently demonstrated that Lindley’s conditions are insufficient for consistency and that reconstructions like Jeffreys’ or Hacking’s lead to contradiction ([15], PP. 721-727).
Can Scientific History Repeat?
Authors: Barker Peter
Published: January 2016

Kuhn (1962), Lakatos (1978) and Laudan (1977) all subscribe to a view of science which admits the existence of large scale entities differing from theories. Kuhn called these entities ‘paradigms’, Lakatos called them ‘research programs’ and Laudan calls them ‘research traditions’. These entities are distinguished from theories by their historical durability and the unique manner in which they succeed one another. The history of science may be described as a succession of eras during each of which one (or more) of these entities was dominant. During its era of dominance one of these entities may support several incompatible theories which replace one another successively but share certain common features. These features may be (part of) a common ontology, a common set of epistemological standards employed in gathering observational evidence, or common methodological or conceptual directives employed in solving new scientific problems. Although theories may change, these features (or some of these features) do not, instead they are the province of the large scale entity.
Micro-States in the Interpretation of Quantum Theory
Authors: Hardegree Gary M.
Published: January 2016

In the present work, I discuss the interpretation of quantum mechanics (QM) from the viewpoint of quantum logic (QL). I regard the objects of QL to be the possible (accidental) properties that can be ascribed to a quantum system SYS. The basic idea is that, at any given moment t, SYS actualizes some properties, but not others. The micro-state of SYS at time t is identified with the set of all properties that SYS actualizes at time t.

One thing an interpretation of QM is supposed to do, I believe, is delineate the admissible quantum micro-states. Since the characterization of quantum micro-states is intimately related to the characterization of quantum logical consistency, the interpretation of QM is intimately tied to the interpretation of QL.

Two kinds of interpretations are discussed. Strict interpretations are based on the assumption that the properties of a system are individuated by the projection operators on the associated Hilbert space.
Are There Cases of Simultaneous Causation?
Authors: Kline A. David
Published: January 2016

The problem of the direction of causation has received considerable press. Justifiably so, since it is a major bottleneck in accounts of causation and explanation. But there is another, not unrelated, yet unexamined, temporal issue for those same accounts. Numerous writers have uncritically assumed that there are instances of simultaneous causation. (A necessary condition for e and e', two causally related events, to be in a simultaneous causal relation is that there be no time-difference between e and e' or that e and e' occur at the same time.)

The assumption is not impotent. Alleged instances of simultaneous causation have been used to argue against various views of causation/explanation. For example, Richard Taylor (1966), Douglas Gasking (1955) and Baruch Brody (1972) have used such cases to critique regularity or nomic-subsumption accounts. Myles Brand (1979) in a very recent paper uses simultaneous causation to challenge Wesley Salmon's statistical relevance analysis (1970).
Critique of the Papers of Fine and Suppes
Authors: Shimony Abner
Published: January 2016

‘Bell's Theorem’ is the collective name for a family of arguments, which more accurately should be referred to as ‘Theorems of Bell's Type’, all being variants of the remarkable argument given by J. S. Bell (1964). All of these arguments have the format E & H → I, where E is a description of a type of experimental setup involving pairs of particles emitted from a common source, H is a physical hypothesis which typically expresses some version of “realism” and some version of “locality”, and I is an inequality concerning correlations between particles of a pair. There are differences among theorems of Bell's type regarding the details of the inequality I , which are important in actually carrying out experimental tests. There are differences regarding the arrow—i.e., the procedure whereby I is inferred from E & H.
On After-Trial Criticisms of Neyman-Pearson Theory of Statistics
Authors: Mayo Deborah G.
Published: January 2016

Whether it is due to the incompleteness of information, inaccuracies of measurement, or stochastic nature of phenomena, a great deal of scientific inference requires probabilistic considerations. In carrying out such inferences, the statistical methods predominantly used are from the Neyman-Pearson Theory of statistics (NPT). Nevertheless, NPT has been the target of such severe criticisms that nearly all philosophers of induction and statistics have rejected it as inadequate for statistical inference in science. If these criticisms do in fact demonstrate the inadequacy of NPT, then a good portion of statistical inference in science will lack justification. Because of the seriousness of such a conclusion, it is important to carefully consider whether critics of NPT have succeeded in demonstrating its inadequacy.
Do Virtual Particles Exist?
Authors: Weingard Robert
Published: January 2016

In a recent paper, Shrader-Frechette (1977) has argued that there is a serious (and perhaps fatal) unclarity in the notions of particle and fundamental particle currently used in high energy physics. Shrader-Frechette focuses on the notion of a virtual particle as one of the contributors to this unclarity. Among the reasons offered for this focus are: (1) virtual particles are (in some sense) not observable, and (2) they are introduced merely to balance the “books” so conservation laws hold.

More recently, Hendrick and Murphy (1981) have argued that Shrader-Frechette's overall critique of the notions of particle and fundamental particle rests on a number of confusions and in this I am in complete agreement. Here, I am just interested in their response to Shrader-Frechette's remarks about virtual particles.
Quantum Field Theory for Philosophers
Authors: Redhead Michael L.G.
Published: January 2016

…the quantum theory of fields is the contemporary locus of metaphysical research. (Stein 1970, p. 285)

It is now generally recognized that Quantum Field Theory (QFT), after many vicissitudes and a period of almost total neglect, has emerged during the last ten years as a triumphant framework in which to do elementary particle physics.

If philosophers are prepared to use current physical theory as a guide to resolving metaphysical questions (and that is a big “If”), then QFT is what philosophers should all be studying. But the subject is notoriously.recondite, and philosophers are busy people, so the objective of the present paper is to cut through all technicalities and try to tell in as straightforward a way as possible just what QFT has to say about “reality”.
Inference in Perception
Authors: Rock Irvin
Published: January 2016

The thesis of this paper is that perception is intelligent in that it is based on the same kinds of operations that characterize thought. However, the dependence of perception on sensory information makes for certain differences between it and “higher” cognitive functions such as imagination and thinking. Clearly the phenomenal experience of a percept is different from that of thought. Still the processes underlying these different mental end products may be quite similar. Although we know little about the nature of thought, a demonstration that perception results from cognitve operations does constitute an explanation. Others seek to explain perception in very different ways.

To turn the problem around so to speak, it is entirely possible that thinking evolved from perception. Perception might be the evolutionary link between low level sensory processes that mediated simple detection of environmental changes in phylogenetically primitive organisms and high level cognitve processes.
Presentations and the Status of Theories
Authors: Griesemer James
Published: January 2016

Accounts of the structure of scientific theories in twentieth century philosophy of science have tended to focus on epistemological questions to the near exclusion of the metaphysical consequences of their solutions. This emphasis can be understood as resulting from the interest and concerns of the logical positivist movement and continued by proponents of the so-called “received view” of theories (Suppe 1977). One area where this division of interest has been a barrier to progress is understanding the growth of scientific knowledge.

While philosophers as diverse as Nagel, Hempel, Kuhn, and Lakatos have attempted to explain the historical course of science, they have largely built their views on foundations designed to explicate the relation between theories (paradigms, scientific research programs) and the world. Thus, the received view's model of progress via theory (or indeed, whole science) reduction (e.g., Nagel 1961) rests on its largely syntactic/logical account of theory structure.
Pluralism and Panselectionism
Authors: Beatty Joh
Published: January 2016

It is certainly not unreasonable to try to account for patterns of variation in nature in terms of evolution by natural selection. But there are more or less “avid” proponents of this way of understanding nature who are, according to critics, more or less reasonable in inverse proportion. Attempts to understand nature in terms of evolution by natural selection can, according to these critics, be pushed too far. Just how far such pursuits can reasonably be pushed is the central problem of this paper.

I will discuss this issue in the context of an episode in the history of evolutionary biology that has been labelled by Stephen Gould, “the hardening of the evolutionary synthesis” (Gould 1980, 1982, 1983). In the course of the hardening of the synthesis, evolutionists attributed a greater and greater role to natural selection, and correspondingly less and less a role to alternative evolutionary agents—minimizing in particular the role of so-called “random drift”.
Philosophy and Economic Methodology
Authors: Hausman Daniel M
Published: January 2016

Most methodological writing on economics is by economists. Although the bulk is produced by lesser members of the profession, almost all leading economists have at one time or another tried their hand at methodological reflection. The results are usually poor. If one read only their methodology, one would have a hard time understanding how Milton Friedman or Paul Samuelson could possibly win Nobel Prizes. It thus is less surprising that the economics profession professes such scorn for philosophizing than that its members spend so much of their time doing it.

Methodological reflections on economics pose other puzzles, too. Although this literature is heavily influenced by philosophy—both current and, especially, out-dated—, it is cut off from philosophical discourse. This quasi-autonomy is puzzling, since this literature is concerned with questions that appear to be instances of, if not the same as the questions with which philosophers of science are concerned.
The Reception of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems
Authors: Dawson John W
Published: January 2016

“Die Arbeit über formal unentscheidbare Sätze wurde wie ein Erdbeben empfunden; insbesondere auch von Carnap.” - - (Popper 1980).

“Kurt Gödel's achievement in modern logic … is a landmark which will remain visible far in space and time.” - - John von Neumann

It is natural to invoke geological metaphors to describe the impact and the lasting significance of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Indeed, how better to convey the impact of those results - - whose effect on Hilbert's program was so devastating and whose philosophical reverberations have yet to subside - - than to speak of tremors and shock waves? The image of shaken foundations is irresistible.
Scientific Explanation: Three Basic Conceptions
Authors: Salmon Wesley C
Published: January 2016

When one takes a long look at the concept (or concepts) of scientific explanation, it is possible and plausible to distinguish three fundamental philosophical views. These might be called the epistemic, modal, and ontic. They can be discerned in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics and they are conspicuous in the twentieth-century literature. In its classic form—the inferential version—the epistemic conception takes scientific explanations to be arguments. During the period of almost four decades since the publication of the landmark Hempel-Oppenheim article, “Studies in the Logic of Explanation” (1948), the chairman of this symposium (Carl G. Hempel) has done more than anyone else to articulate, elaborate, and defend this basic conception and the familiar models that give it substance (Hempel 1965), though it has, of course, had many other champions as well. According to the modal conception, scientific explanations do their jobs by showing that what did happen had to happen.
Spatial Perception and Geometry in Kant and Helmholtz
Authors: Hatfield Gar
Published: January 2016

Can there be an empirical science of the mind? Opinions are divided. If within the purview of ‘mind’ we include the phenomena that are associated with such words as ‘reasoning’, ‘understanding’, and ‘judging’, then many philosophers would take the answer to be an obvious no. As these philosophers might say, understanding and judgment are “normative” notions; they are not processes, but achievements, and trying to investigate them empirically would make as much sense as trying to determine the meaning of the words ‘just’ and ‘right’, or of the term ‘good art’, by tape-recording random snatches of conversation and cataloguing the instances of these words and their contexts. But not everyone is so pessimistic. Indeed, tens of millions of dollars currently are being wagered on the chance that just like the solar system or the chemical elements, the mind can be made the object of empirical study.
Causality as an Overarching Principle in Physics
Authors: Cushing James T.
Published: January 2016

In the recent philosophy of science literature, several authors have stressed the many-faceted and evolving nature of the scientific enterprise. Dudley Shapere (1984, pp. xiii-xv) characterizes a central weakness of the logical empirical program as its focus on the formal logical structure of scientific theories to the exclusion of the process by which these theories were constructed, thus ignoring the possibility of fundamental changes in the nature of science itself. He has stressed the importance of formulating a view of science based on an accurate description of actual scientific practice, which includes attention to how the meaning of a scientific term is rooted in this evolving matrix of practice. Janet Kourany (1982) has attempted” …to lay the foundations for a purely empirical method for establishing a theory of science” (p. 526). In arguing that the a priori has no place in such an approach and in responding to the charge that such an empirical method cannot produce an absolutely fixed set of criteria, Kourany (p. 546) reminds us of Popper’s observation about another empirical enterprise and suggests that we apply this same admonition to our expectations for an empirical method of constructing a theory of science itself.
Internal Realism, Truth and Understanding
Authors: Steinhoff Gordon
Published: January 2016

In this paper I intend to discuss difficulties which face Hilary Putnam’s internal realism, difficulties which involve issues in semantics. I hope to show that Putnam has not presented a viable theory of truth. Putnam wishes to avoid relativism, which he claims is incoherent. My argument against Putnam’s theory of truth will be that Putnam has avoided relativism at only a very superficial level. On a deeper analysis we will see that Putnam has in fact not avoided relativism.

Putnam has abandoned the correspondence theory of truth since he can make no sense of the claim that our words, thoughts, images, sensations, etc. correspond to external objects. Considerations of human psychology (1983a, p.viii), as well as problems concerning reference (1981; 1983a, pp.vii-xviii; 1983b), have led Putnam to adopt the view that truth must be analyzed in terms of justification.
What is Wrong with Strict Bayesianism?
Authors: Maher Patrick
Published: January 2016

Bayesian decision theory in its classical formulation supposes that for any rational agent and for any possible state x of the world, there is a number P(x). which represents the agent’s judgment of the probability of x. Similarly, the theory assumes that for any possible outcome y of the agent’s actions, there is a number u(y) which represents the utility or value of y to the agent. Given these assumptions, the theory is able to define the expected value for the agent of any act. Bayesian decision theory then recommends that the agent should choose, from amongst the available acts, one which has maximal expected utility.

The assumption that an agent has a determinate personal probability function has often been attacked.
Abduction by Classification and Assembly
Authors: Josephson John R. , Chandrasekaran B. , Smith Jack W. , Tanner Michael C.
Published: January 2016

We describe a general problem solving mechanism that is especially suited for performing a particular form of abductive inference, or best-explanation finding. A problem solver embodying this mechanism synthesizes composite hypotheses. It does so by by combining hypothesis parts as a means to the satisfaction of explanatory goals. In this way it is able to arrive at complex, integrated conclusions which are not pre-stored.

The intent is to present a computationally-feasible, task-specific problem solver for a particular information processing task which is nevertheless of very great generality. The task is that of synthesizing coherent composite explanatory hypotheses based upon a prestored, and possibly vast collection of hypothesis-generating “concepts”. The authors’ claim is nothing less than to have shown, in a new sense, and surpassing all other work in this area, how it is computationally possible for an agent to come to “know”, based upon the evidence of the case.
On Human Nature
Authors: Hull David L.
Published: January 2016

Generations of philosophers have argued that all human beings are essentially the same, that is, they share the same nature, and that this essential similarity is extremely important. Periodically philosophers have proposed to base the essential sameness of human beings on biology. In this paper I argue that if ‘biology’ is taken to refer to the technical pronouncements of professional biologists, in particular evolutionary biologists, it is simply not true that all organisms that belong to Homo sapiens as a biological species are essentially the same. If ‘characters’ is taken to refer to evolutionary homologies, then periodically a biological species might be characterized by one or more characters which are both universally distributed among and limited to the organisms belonging to that species, but such states of affairs are temporary, contingent, and relatively rare.
Generative Entrenchment and Evolution
Authors: Schank Jeffrey C. , Wimsatt William C.
Published: January 2016

Interest in and detailed studies of development go back to Aristotle, and antedated serious work on evolution. In the 19th century, theories of and information about development played a significant role in evolutionary thought. This wave reached a crest with Emst Haeckel's late 19th century attempted fusion of evolutionary and developmental ideas through the study of comparative embryology via his ‘Biogenetic law’ that ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phytogeny.’ With the rise of experimental methods for studying development, and the separation of the study of heredity from that of development leading to the birth of genetics as a separate discipline, Haeckel's views fell out of favor by the first decade of the 20th century as evolutionary thought took on new directions. (See, e.g., Allen 1979, Gould 1977, and the essays by Hamburger and Churchill in Mayr and Provine (1980)).
Experiment and the Development of the Theory of Weak Interactions: Fermi's Theory
Authors: Franklin Allan
Published: January 2016

One of the enduring problems in history and philosophy of science is the interaction between theory and experiment. Hacking (1983) has argued persuasively that experiment often has a life of its own, independent of theory. Lakatos (1970), on the other hand, has argued that theory often proceeds independently of experimental results. More typically, the interaction seems to be rather complex. Experiment may confirm or refute a theory or call for a new theory. Theory may suggest new experiments, offer a new interpretation of known results, or help to validate an experimental result. These are, of course, not the only possibilities (Hacking 1983 and Franklin 1986, Chapter 4).

In dealing with the complex interaction between theory and experiment the old cliche, “Man proposes, Nature disposes,” has been shown to be far from adequate. Pickering's study of quark models and theory (1984a) has shown that it is not always clear at the time what is being proposed.
The Absolute Arithmetic and Geometric Continua
Authors: Ehrlich Philip
Published: January 2016

With the appearance of J.H. Conway's On Numbers and Games (1976), the mathematical and philosophical communities have much to celebrate. It is Conway's important discovery that the familiar Dedekind cut and von Neumann ordinal constructions are part of a more general construction which leads to a proper class of numbers embracing the reals and the ordinals as well as many less familiar numbers including -ω, ω/2, l/ω, √ω and ω-π, where ω is the least infinite ordinal. Conway further shows that the arithmetic of the reals may be extended to the entire class yielding a real-closed ordered field (1976, pp. 40-42); that is, an ordered field where every positive element is a square, and every polynomial of odd degree with coefficients in the field has a solution in the field.
What Numbers are Real?
Authors: Manders Kenneth L.
Published: January 2016

Perhaps one of the chief items of pride of mathematical philosophy in the last century and a half is the insight that mathematics is the science of formal structures; as opposed to the traditional view, that ‘the proper and exclusive subject matter of mathematics is…quantity.’ Closely associated with this insight is the distinction between pure mathematics, the beneficiary of the freedom conferred by the new status, and applied mathematics (in the philosopher's rather than the mathematician's sense of the word), which has been sent into philosophical limbo, supposedly under the care of philosophy of empirical science.

These two insights allow us to avoid many embarrassments. Our postulated freedom to adore gods other than Quantity allows us to break the seemingly endless circle of pointless debate, whether or not negative and complex numbers are legitimate quantities; our assumption that mathematical truth is independent of physical truth relieves us of the worry, whether Euclidean or non-Euclidean geometries are legitimate.
Probability as a Theoretical Concept in Physics
Authors: Krüger Lorenz
Published: January 2016

What is the use of probability theory in the sciences? A common answer to this question is: probability is the conceptual tool for statistics, i.e. for the evaluation of collections of numerical data. This reply, that covers a wide range of applications may be rendered by saying that the calculus of probability is the theory for statistical practice. Under this interpretation, probability is part of scientific method; it belongs to the ‘logic’ of science, i.e. it regulates scientific inference. At most, it says something about the state of justified belief of a scientist, but nothing about the nature of his objects.

If I speak of probability as a theoretical concept, I intend to refer to a different use of probability in the sciences; an explanatory use, or - more cautiously put - a use within the framework of explanatory theories, e.g. in microphysics or evolutionary biology. Compared with the standard application to statistics, this use is exceptional and problematical.
Procedural Representation in Michael Faraday's Scientific Thought
Authors: Tweney Ryan D.
Published: January 2016

Michael Faraday (1791-1867) was a productive, historically significant, figure who has served as the subject of several recent attempts to construct a cognitive model of the nature of scientific thinking (Gooding, 1985; Nersessian, 1984; Tweney, 1985a; in press). Of particular interest in the present context is the relation of such an analysis to the broader issue of the role of cognitive accounts in the philosophy of science. In accord with Giere's call for a ‘cognitive realism,’ I believe there are substantial philosophical implications that stem from one overriding characteristic of Faraday's work, namely his reliance on procedural ways of thinking. By procedural, I mean thinking which is rooted in specific activities whether concrete or abstract. As will become clear, my use of this term places me at odds with those psychologists, like Piaget, who regard concrete thought as different in kind and less powerful than formal thought. While it is indeed different in kind, it is not less powerful.
One Epistemological Interfield Relation
Authors: Kinoshita Joyce
Published: January 2016

In recent decades, much work has been directed toward clarifying the logical relations among various sciences. Because of an emphasis on the logical aspects of interfield relations, the issue of scientific unity often wore a distinctly logical mantle.1 For example, Robert Causey, a prominent philosopher of this tradition, has linked scientific unity and progress to a project of successive microreductions. He states, “Other things being equal, we tend to feel that our understanding of a class of phenomena increases as we develop increasingly general and intuitively unified theories of that class of phenomena. It is therefore natural to consider the possibility of one very general, unified theory which, at least in principle, governs all known phenomena.” (1977, p. 1)

Kinds of unity separable from reductive logical unity have, of course, been proposed; these include reductive and nonreductive unities of method, translation, and ontology. For example, J.A. Fodor (1974) has argued for a broad kind of ontological unity of token physicalism, and against type reduction.
Was There a Crisis Before the Copernican Revolution? A Reappraisal of Gingerich’s Criticisms of Kuhn
Authors: Griffiths Robert I.
Published: January 2016

In this essay I will discuss and appraise two conflicting answers to the question of whether there was a crisis in Ptolemaic astronomy prior to the Copernican revolution. I will begin by giving a brief account of why anybody should be interested in this question. I will discuss the two conflicting answers of Kuhn (1962, 1970), who claims to present evidence which shows that Ptolemaic astronomy was anomaly-ridden at the time of Copernicus, and of Gingerich (1975), who claims that the supposed anomalies, which have been passed down in the historical literature due to poor scholarship, are fictitious. Finally I will appraise Gingerich’s criticism of Kuhn, giving my own evaluation of Gingerich’s arguments. I conclude that Gingerich’s arguments against the existence of a technical crisis in Ptolemaic astronomy prior to Copernicus appear to be, either arguments against the efficacy of the Copernican system, or arguments based on definitions of complexity which are not directly attributable to Kuhn.
Five Theses on Instrumental Realism
Authors: Baird Davis
Published: January 2016

Some may find an oxymoron in my title. But, my use of “instrumental” is to focus attention on the real instruments of science-pumps, dynamos and cyclotrons-and not the view that scientific theories are best understood as instruments. In what follows I characterize and argue for a kind of realism strongly wedded to what we do with scientific instruments, and divorced from what our theories may say about the entities manipulated by these instruments. My discussion owes much to Ian Hacking’s “Experimental Argument for Realism” (Hacking 1983, ch. 16).

The following fantasy might help give some idea of the view I am interested in. Suppose that the diskettes, which many people use in conjunction with a small computer, do not store information magnetically; in fact they store it “radioactively,” exactly how, is not relevant. IBM decided that many people in their target personal computer market would be put off by “nuclear diskettes.”
Arguing for the Natural Ontological Attitude
Authors: Rouse Joseph
Published: January 2016

In several recent papers, Arthur Fine has developed a far-reaching attack upon both the standard realist interpretations of science and their most prominent anti-realist alternatives (1986a, 1986b, 1986c). In their place, Fine proposes not another position on the realist/anti-realist axis, but an attitude toward science, the “natural ontological attitude” (NOA), which is supposed to remove any felt need for a philosophical interpretation of science.

In this paper I will be concerned with Fine’s reasons for adopting NOA rather than his arguments against realism and anti-realism. Unless these reasons are adequate, Fine’s papers are likely to set off a scramble for new and better arguments concerning realism, rather than the reorientation of the philosophy of science which his polemics are clearly intended to provoke. Thus for my purposes, we can presume that Fine’s criticisms of standard positions are generally sound. The question is whether Fine’s proposed alternative attitude can then satisfy the same argumentative standards.
Modest Realism
Authors: Newton-Smith William
Published: January 2016

It was once fashionable to treat realism as an explanatory theory of science. This realism treats the sentences of science, both observational and theoretical, literally: such sentences are true or false as the case may be in some correspondence sense of truth. To this was added the epistemological claims that it was in principle possible to discover whether any given sentence was in fact true or false and that science has been progressive. In view of the fact that theories seemed to have a bad track-record - from the point of view of truth they all seem sooner or later come unstuck - the realist offered a more modest goal for science; producing more approximately true theories. The strategy for defending realism was explanatory. The realist claimed that inference to the best explanation (hereafter cited as IBE) was a standard epistemic tool of the scientist and ought to be available to the philosopher.
Truth or Consequences? Generative Versus Consequential Justification in Science
Authors: Nickles Thomas
Published: January 2016

For the past century the Central Dogma of confirmation theory has been:

All empirical support (of a theoretical claim) = empirical evidence = empirical data = successful test results = successful predictions or postdictions = true empirical consequences (of the claim plus auxiliary assumptions).

According to the Dogma, all empirical support derives from empirical testing of predicted consequences. I shall attack this pure consequentialism and defend the importance of generative justification in science.

One question which has been widely debated through the years is whether “postdicting” or explaining already known phenomena provides as much epistemic support for an hypothesis as predicting new phenomena or, indeed, whether explanation provides any support at all. I believe that explanation is on a par with prediction, but I want to address a different question here. Both explanation and prediction (as usually construed) involve consequential reasoning.
Toward a More Objective Understanding of the Evidence of Carcinogenic Risk
Authors: Mayo Deborah G.
Published: January 2016

The field of quantified risk assessment is a new field, only about 20 years old, and already it is considered to be in a crisis. As Funtowicz and J.R. Ravetz (1985) put it:

The concept of risk in terms of probability has proved to be so elusive, and statistical inference so problematic, that many experts in the field have recently either lost hope of finding a scientific solution or lost faith in Risk Analysis as a tool for decisionmaking. (p.219)

Thus the ‘art’ of the assessment of risks… is at an impasse. The early hopes that it could be reduced to a science are frustrated. …[O]thers are tending to introduce the ‘human’ and ‘cultural’ factors. The question now becomes, to what extent should these predominate? Would it be to the reduction or exclusion of the ‘scientific’ aspects? For, …if the perceived phenomena of ‘risks’ are interpreted as lacking all objective content or being merely a small part of some total cultural configuration, then there is no basis for dialogue between opposed positions on such problems, (pp.220-221)
Logicism, Pragmatism, and Metascience: Towards a Pancritical Pragmatic Theory of Meta-level Discourse
Authors: Axtell G.S.
Published: January 2016

Both inside and outside philosophy of science, the past 25 years has seen a remarkable increase in the epistemic importance attached to the role of background beliefs and values of agents engaged in cognitive inquiry. Emphasis on the role of background commitments has been beneficial in bringing philosophy of science back into closer relation with the varied forms of science. But at present there cannot be said to be any clear consensus among philosophers on issues of the theoretical status of such commitments, or of their import upon conceptions of scientific meta-methodology.

The situation worsens when one considers widespread suspicion today among many historicists and sociologists of science of the viability of philosophy of science as a normative enterprise. This marks the ground between normative epistemology and its critics. But to understand the skeptical attitude towards normative theory, one must attend to the background assumptions about normative discourse imbedded in logical empiricism, and in particular to the state of logical empiricist metascience just prior to the revolution of sorts that occurred in the 1960’s.
Behavior, Biology, and Information Theory
Authors: Senchuk Dennis M.
Published: January 2016

Konrad Lorenz does not view behaviors as innate; he does not even regard differences among behaviors (of different species) as innate. Rather, he construes information (about the environment to which the behavior is adapted) as the innate component of (some) behavior. His noted deprivation experiments are intended to withhold environmental sources of that information from the organism: should the organism nevertheless exhibit behavior evidencing possession of such information, then that information must be innate. Lorenz interprets this conclusion to mean that the information is transmitted to the organism genetically, by way of a sort of blueprint in the genome.

D.S. Lehrman quarrels with the figure of a blueprint:

A blueprint is isomorphic with the structure that it represents…. It is not true that each structure and character in the phenotype is “represented” in a single gene or well defined groups of genes; it is not the case that each gene refers solely or even primarily, to a single structure or character; and it is not the case that the topographical or topological relationships among the genes are isomorphic with the structural or topographical relationships among phenotypic structures to which the genes refer. (Lehrman 1970, p. 34).
Causal Independence in EPR Arguments
Authors: Butterfield Jeremy
Published: January 2016

I show that locality, as it occurs in EPR arguments for the incompleteness of quantum mechanics, can be construed as causal independence understood in terms of Lewis’ counterfactual analysis of causation. This construal has two benefits. It supplements recent analyses, which have not treated locality in detail. And it clarifies the relation between two EPR arguments that have recently been distinguished. It shows that the simpler of the two is more complex than has been thought; and that the other argument does not need ‘counterfactual definiteness’.

I aim to show that in the EPR argument (Einstein et al. 1935) for the incompleteness of quantum mechanics (QM), locality can be taken as causal independence, understood in terms of Lewis’ counterfactual analysis of causation.

Recent analyses of the EPR argument makes this construal of locality timely, for two reasons. First, these analyses typically say little about locality.
Kochen’s Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
Authors: Arntzenius Frank
Published: January 2016

It is well-known that developments of quantum mechanical states according to the Schrödinger equation during a measurement seem to prevent measurements from having definite results. For, the usually assumed (idealized) Schrödinger development of the measured object and the measuring apparatus during a measurement typically results in a state of the entire system which is a superposition of the eigenstates of the measured observable and measuring observable. And the most common interpretations of quantum mechanics state that an observable does not have a definite value if the quantum mechanical state is a superposition of the eigenstates of the observable. Many ways out of this problem have been suggested. I want to discuss an interpretation suggested by S. Kochen (Kochen 1985), and suggest similar interpretations, each of which accept the universal validity of the Schrödinger equation, and yet yield definite results for measurements.
Mathematical Physics and Elementary Logic
Authors: Mundy Brent
Published: January 2016

Modern mathematical physics uses real-number variables, and therefore presupposes set theory. (A real number is defined as a certain kind of set or sequence of natural or rational numbers.) Set theory is also used to define the operations of differential calculus, needed to state physical laws as differential equations constraining the numerical variables representing physical quantities. The derivative f' = df(t)/dt is defined as the limit of an infinite sequence of terms [f(t+e)-f(t)]/e as e → 0, and this definition can only be expressed in a language allowing reference to infinite sequences. Moreover, closure under these limit operations again requires the underlying field of numbers to be Dedekind complete, hence to include all of the reals.

The possibility that mathematical physics depends essentially upon set theory is disturbing, for two distinct reasons. From a logical viewpoint, it is disturbing that an important branch of natural science should depend upon a part of logic or mathematics whose status remains uncertain and controversial.
Epistemological Time Asymmetry
Authors: Savitt Steven F.
Published: January 2016

There is a wide-spread belief that we know more about the past than we do about the future. It may be difficult to express the content of this belief exactly and it may turn out that, when we find some precise expression of this belief, it is not so obviously true. I shall assume, however, that there is something to a belief shared not only by eminent philosophers but by cultures wholly distinct from our own, as the following quote indicates.

We know where the future is. It’s in front of us. Right? It lies before us—a great future lies before us—we stride forward confidently into it, every commencement, every election year. And we know where the past is. Behind us, right? So that we have to turn around to see it, and that interrupts our progress ever forward into the future, so we don’t really much like to do it.
Ten Types of Scientific Progress
Authors: Kukla Andre
Published: January 2016

In the opening chapters of Progress and Its Problems, Laudan presents a taxonomy of scientific accomplishments that has become very well-known among philosophers of science (Laudan 1977). I wish to point out some important omissions in this taxonomy and to recommend an alternative scheme. I believe that the distinctions I have drawn among scientific tasks are philosophically more interesting than Laudan’s. But I am not prepared to defend this opinion in detail. My chief claim is that the new taxonomy is demonstrably closer to being exhaustive. So far as I know, it is exhaustive, although I would not be greatly surprised to discover oversights. A major benefit of Laudan’s scheme was that it called attention to conceptual (as opposed to empirical) activities in science which had frequently been left out of account in generalizations about the nature of scientific work.
Causes and Laws: The Asymmetry Puzzle
Authors: Byerly Henry
Published: January 2016

How are causes and laws related? Some attempt to analyze causal relations in terms of laws, others view causal explanation as quite distinct from explanation using laws. My analysis of the relations between causes and laws focuses on cases such as the simple pendulum law where asymmetries in causal relations between quantities are not reflected in the functional dependencies in the law equations. The asymmetry puzzle has elicited a variety of accounts which reflect quite different views on the relation between causes and laws and their roles in scientific explanation. Finding none of the usual accounts satisfying, I offer an explication based on some distinctions in the analysis of the relevant causes that are not commonly heeded. I criticize the very notion of causal law and examine some implications of my account forceteris paribusproblems which arise in attempts to give realist interpretations of scientific theories.