bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Understanding
Authors: Elgin Catherine Z.
Published: September 2018

Understanding has recently become a focus of epistemological interest. Some, including Kvanvig (2003) and Pritchard (2010) maintain that it is intrinsically or finally valuable – that is, valuable in and of itself. Whether or not that is so, it is certainly important enough to be taken seriously. Following Kvanvig (2013), one may distinguish between two sorts of understanding – propositional understanding and objectual understanding. Propositional understanding is the sort of understanding that is expressed in individual propositions such as ‘Paul understands that the election is on Tuesday’ or ‘Ann understands why the bus is late’. Objectual understanding is understanding of a topic, subject matter, or body of information: Joan understands thermodynamics or Joe understands the stock market. Objectual understanding is then expressly holistic in a way that propositional understanding is not. One might doubt that the two are distinct. Perhaps the body of information that someone who has objectual understanding understands is simply a long, conjunctive proposition. If so, objectual understanding reduces to propositional understanding. Alternatively, perhaps the understanding of an individual matter of fact only is understanding because it is backed by a complex justificatory network. Then the agent’s grasp of the entire network is implicated in her understanding that, or why p. Things are not so simple. The first step is to investigate the two sorts of understanding separately.
Archaeology, philosophy of
Authors: Wylie Alison
Published: September 2018

Questions about the scientific status of archaeology have been central to field-defining debates since the late nineteenth century and have frequently involved appeals to philosophical sources. With the possible exception of Collingwood, however, there was little systematic exploration of the bearing of philosophical literature on these questions until the advent, in the 1960s and 1970s, of the New Archaeology, a self-consciously positivist research programme. The New Archaeology originated in North America but has been widely influential, especially in giving prominence to philosophical and theoretical issues. The New Archaeologists’ advocacy of a positivist (Hempelian) conception of scientific goals and practice provoked intense debate which involved philosophers of science as well as archaeologists from the early 1970s. Although the positivist commitments of the programme were widely repudiated a decade later, philosophical exchange has continued and expanded to include consideration of a range of post-positivist models of scientific inference that emphasize the theory-ladeness of archaeological evidence, as well as hermeneutic and post-structuralist models of archaeological interpretation. The analysis of epistemological issues is also closely tied to foundational questions about how the cultural subject of archaeological inquiry should be conceptualized and has led, increasingly, to a consideration of normative questions about the values and interests that shape archaeological research and the ethical responsibilities of practitioners. In 1992 Embree argued that work in this area had achieved sufficient maturity to be recognized as a subfield which he designated ‘meta-archaeology’.
Bridgman, Percy William (1882–1961)
Authors: Suppe Frederick
Published: September 2018

Bridgman founded high-pressure experimental physics and was committed to a classical empiricist view of science – a view challenged by twentieth-century developments in relativistic and quantum mechanics. He argued that developments in special relativity showed the experimental operations scientists performed were suitable substitutes for basic constituents of matter, thus founding operationalism, a methodological position which influenced logical positivism and, transformed beyond his recognition, was expropriated by the behaviourist school in the social sciences. As Bridgman grappled with the challenges of general relativity and quantum mechanics, he increasingly parted company with his positivistic and behaviourist followers by moving more towards subjectivist views of science and knowledge. These later views led him to see and explore intimate connections between foundations of scientific knowledge and human freedom.
Campbell, Norman Robert (1880–1949)
Authors: Mellor D.H.
Published: September 2018

Campbell made important contributions to philosophy of science in the 1920s, influenced by Poincaré, Russell and his own work in physics. He produced pioneering analyses of the nature of physical theories and of measurement, but is mainly remembered for requiring a theory, for example, the kinetic theory of gases, to have an ‘analogy’, that is, an independent interpretation, for example, as laws of motion of a swarm of microscopic particles.
Constructivism
Authors: Downes Stephen M.
Published: September 2018

Originally proposed by sociologists of science, constructivism or social constructivism is a view about the nature of scientific knowledge held by many philosophers of science. Constructivists maintain that scientific knowledge is made by scientists and not determined by the world. This makes constructivists antirealists. Constructivism here should not be confused with constructivism in mathematics or logic, although there are some similarities. Constructivism is more aptly compared with Berkeley’s idealism.

Most constructivist research involves empirical study of a historical or a contemporary episode in science, with the aim of learning how scientists experiment and theorize. Constructivists try not to bias their case studies with presuppositions about how scientific research is directed. Thus their approach contrasts with approaches in philosophy of science that assume scientists are guided by a particular method. From their case studies, constructivists have concluded that scientific practice is not guided by any one set of methods. Thus constructivism is relativist or antirationalist.

There are two familiar (and related) criticisms of constructivism. First, since constructivists are self-avowed relativists, some philosophers argue that constructivism fails for the same reasons that relativism fails. But many philosophers of science note that relativism can be characterized in various ways and that versions of relativism can be useful in the interpretation of science. Therefore, constructivism’s relativism does not by itself render it unacceptable. Second, constructivists are accused of believing that scientists literally ‘make the world’, in the way some make houses or cars. This is probably not the best way to understand constructivism. Rather, constructivism requires only the weaker thesis that scientific knowledge is ‘produced’ primarily by scientists and only to a lesser extent determined by fixed structures in the world. This interprets constructivism as a thesis about our access to the world via scientific representations. For example, constructivists claim that the way we represent the structure of DNA is a result of many interrelated scientific practices and is not dictated by some ultimate underlying structure of reality. Constructivist research provides important tools for epistemologists specializing in the study of scientific knowledge.
Darwin, Charles Robert (1809–82)
Authors: Bowler Peter J.
Published: September 2018

Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) popularized the theory that all living things have evolved by natural processes from preexisting forms. This displaced the traditional belief that species were designed by a wise and benevolent God. Darwin showed how many biological phenomena could be explained on the assumption that related species are descended from a common ancestor. Furthermore, he proposed a radical mechanism to explain how the transformations came about, namely, natural selection. This harsh and apparently purposeless mechanism was seen as a major threat to the claim that the universe has a transcendent goal.

Because Darwin openly extended his evolutionism to include the human race, it was necessary to re-examine the foundations of psychology, ethics and social theory. Moral values might be merely the rationalization of instinctive behaviour patterns. Since the process which produced these patterns was driven by struggle, it could be argued that society must inevitably reflect the harshness of nature (‘social Darwinism’). Darwin’s book has been seen as the trigger for a ’scientific revolution’. It took many decades for both science and Western culture to assimilate the more radical aspects of Darwin’s theory. But since the mid-twentieth century Darwin’s selection mechanism has become the basis for a highly successful theory of evolution, the human consequences of which are still being debated.
Electrodynamics
Authors: Cushing James T.
Published: September 2018

Electric charges interact via the electric and magnetic fields they produce. Electrodynamics is the study of the laws governing these interactions. The phenomena of electricity and of magnetism were once taken to constitute separate subjects. By the beginning of the nineteenth century they were recognized as closely related topics and by the end of that century electromagnetic phenomena had been unified with those of optics. Classical electrodynamics provided the foundation for the special theory of relativity, and its unification with the principles of quantum mechanics has led to modern quantum field theory, arguably our most fundamental physical theory to date.
Paranormal phenomena
Authors: Braude Stephen E.
Published: September 2018

The term ‘paranormal phenomena’ refers to the class of anomalous events studied within the field of parapsychology. Parapsychology’s principal areas of investigation are extrasensory perception (ESP), psychokinesis (PK), and cases suggesting that personal consciousness survives the death of one’s body. ESP phenomena are apparent instances of anomalous transfer of information. They divide into telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition. PK phenomena are forms, roughly speaking, of apparent mind-over-matter. Survival research deals primarily with cases of ostensible reincarnation and mediumship (or ‘channelling’).

The data of parapsychology raise a number of deep philosophical issues. Cases suggesting survival challenge materialist theories of the mind, and (according to some) provide good evidence for Cartesian dualism. ESP and PK challenge assumptions about the nature and temporal direction of causal relations, and also suggest the intimidating possibility that we have direct access to and influence on the thoughts and bodily states of others.
Evolution, theory of
Authors: Lloyd Elisabeth A.
Published: September 2018

The biological theory of evolution advances the view that the variety and forms of life on earth are the result of descent with modification from the earliest forms of life. Evolutionary theory does not attempt to explain the origin of life itself, that is, how the earliest forms of life came to exist, nor does it apply to the history of changes of the non-biological parts of the universe, which are also often described as ’evolutionary’. The mechanisms of natural selection, mutation and speciation are used in evolutionary theory to explain the relations and characteristics of all life forms. Modern evolutionary theory explains a wide range of natural phenomena, including the deep resemblances among organisms, the diversity of life forms, organisms’ possession of vestigial organs and the good fit or ’adaptedness’ between organisms and their environment.

Often summarized as ’survival of the fittest’, the mechanism of natural selection actually includes several distinct processes. There must be variation in traits among the members of a population; these traits must be passed on from parents to offspring; and the different traits must confer differential advantage for reproducing successfully in that environment. Because evidence for each of these processes can be gathered independently of the evolutionary claim, natural selection scenarios are robustly testable. When a trait in a population has arisen because it was directly selected in this fashion, it is called an adaptation.

Genetic mutation is the originating source of variation, and selection processes shape that variation into adaptive forms; random genetic drift and various levels and forms of selection dynamic developed by geneticists have been integrated into a general theory of evolutionary change that encompasses natural selection and genetic mutation as complementary processes. Detailed ecological studies are used to provide evidence for selection scenarios involving the evolution of species in the wild.

Evolutionary theory is supported by an unusually wide range of scientific evidence, gaining its support from fields as diverse as geology, embryology, molecular genetics, palaeontology, climatology and functional morphology. Because of tensions between an evolutionary view of homo sapiens and some religious beliefs, evolutionary theory has remained controversial in the public sphere far longer than no less well-supported scientific theories from other sciences.
Experiment
Authors: Morrison Margaret C.
Published: September 2018

Experiment, as a specific category of scientific activity, did not emerge until the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Seen primarily as an arbiter in theory choice, there was little, if any, analysis of experimental techniques or, the ways in which data become transformed into established facts. Philosophical analysis of experiment was typically simplistic, focusing on the role of observation alone as the foundation for experimental facts. This was challenged by Thomas Kuhn who stressed the importance of background theory and beliefs in all perception, including (its role in) scientific experiment. This interconnection between theory and experiment severely undermined the idea that experiment could stand as an independent and objective criterion for judging the merits of one theory over another.

In the 1980s new philosophical analyses of experiment began to emerge, emphasizing the ways in which experiment could be seen to have a life of its own embodying activities that could supposedly be understood without recourse to theory. Factors important in the evaluation of experimental results as well as the ways in which laboratory science differs from its theoretical counterpart became the focus for a new history and philosophy of experiment. Consequently, further debates arose regarding the relationship of experiment to theory, and whether it is possible to provide a methodological framework within which experimental practice can be evaluated.
Field theory, quantum
Authors: Teller Paul
Published: September 2018

Quantum field theory extends the basic ideas of quantum mechanics for a fixed, finite number of particles to systems comprising fields and an unlimited, indefinite number of particles, providing a coherent blend of field-like and particle-like concepts. One can start from either field- or particle-like concepts, apply the methods of quantum mechanics, and arrive at the same theory. The result inherits all the puzzles of conventional quantum mechanics, such as measurement, superposition and quantum correlations; and it adds a new roster of conceptual difficulties. To mention three: the vacuum seems not really to be empty; the particle concept clashes with classical intuitions; and a method called ‘renormalization’ gets the best predictions in physics, apparently by dropping infinite terms.
Gender and science
Authors: Harding Sandra G.
Published: September 2018

Gender-based analyses of philosophies of science have arisen at the conjunction of two other movements. First, in the 1960s it became increasingly the accepted position that scientific claims failed to reflect only an external reality. Scientific processes are not transparent; they necessarily permit cultural and social values and interests to contribute to the descriptions and explanations of nature’s order. Thus gender values and interests, too, could have shaped scientific practices and claims. Second, women’s movements developed powerful gender analyses of all other aspects of social relations. What resources could such accounts provide to illuminate also the practices and cultures of the sciences?

Consequently, diverse analyses have appeared showing how sexist and androcentric values and interests have shaped scientific projects, and shaped them with unfortunate results not only for gender relations, but also for the advance of both sciences and philosophy. They also examine how other values and interests, ones that are gender-neutral and ones that draw on resources found in women’s lives, can have beneficial effects. Concern has been raised in the following issues. Is correcting ‘bad science’ sufficient to eliminate sexist and androcentric results of research? How has the exclusion of women from those groups that select what will count as scientific problems resulted in narrow and distorted representations of nature’s order? How has excessive reliance on gendered meanings of nature, the scientist, and scientific method – gender coding – shaped scientific claims? If the subject of science remains coded masculine, how can women claim positions as speakers/authors of scientific research – as scientific subjects? In what ways have research procedures (technologies) been gender-coded and how has their use directed the development of subsequent sexist and androcentric technologies and applications of science? Why have standards for maximizing objectivity and good method been too weak to prevent knowledge-decreasing values and interests from shaping the results of research?
Incommensurability
Authors: Shapere Dudley
Published: September 2018

When one scientific theory or tradition is replaced by another in a scientific revolution, the concepts involved often change in fundamental ways. For example, among other differences, in Newtonian mechanics an object’s mass is independent of its velocity, while in relativity mechanics, mass increases as the velocity approaches that of light. Earlier philosophers of science maintained that Einsteinian mechanics reduces to Newtonian mechanics in the limit of high velocities. However, Thomas Kuhn (1962) and Paul Feyerabend (1962, 1965) introduced a rival view. Kuhn argued that different scientific traditions are defined by their adherence to different paradigms, fundamental perspectives which shape or determine not only substantive beliefs about the world, but also methods, problems, standards of solution or explanation, and even what counts as an observation or fact. Scientific revolutions (changes of paradigm) alter all these profoundly, leading to perspectives so different that the meanings of words looking and sounding the same become utterly distinct in the pre- and post-revolutionary traditions. Thus, according to both Kuhn and Feyerabend, the concepts of mass employed in the Newtonian and Einsteinian traditions are incommensurable with one another, too radically different to be compared at all. The thesis that terms in different scientific traditions and communities are radically distinct, and the modifications that have stemmed from that thesis, became known as the thesis of incommensurability.
Kepler, Johannes (1571–1630)
Authors: McMullin Ernan
Published: September 2018

Kepler’s mathematical analysis of Brahe’s observations of the motions of Mars enabled him to formulate the descriptive ‘laws’ of planetary motion, thus giving heliocentric astronomy an empirical basis far more accurate than it had before. He insisted that astronomy had to discover the causes of the motions that the laws described, in this way becoming a ‘physics of the sky’. In the pursuit of this goal, he formulated the notion of distance-dependent forces between sun and planet, and guessed that gravity could be explained as an attraction between heavy bodies and their home planets, analogous to magnetic action, thus pointing the way for Newton’s theory of gravity.
Laws, natural
Authors: Hooker C.A.
Published: September 2018

It is widely supposed that science aims to identify ’natural laws’. But what are laws of nature? How, if at all, do statements of laws differ from ’mere’ general truths which include generalizations true only ’accidentally’? Suppose, for example, it happens to be true that all iron spheres (past, present and future) are less than 1 km in diameter. Contrast this with the truth of ’all electrons are negatively charged’. There seems to be a clear intuitive distinction between these two truths, but is there any principled distinction between them that can be drawn and defended?

This has been the traditional focus of philosophical attention concerning laws of nature, and basically two mutually opposed philosophical accounts have been developed. According to the first account, there are real necessities in nature, over and above the regularities that they allegedly produce (whether or not these regularities are held to be observable), and law-statements are descriptions of these necessities. According to the second account, there are no necessities but only regularities (correlations, patterns) and laws are descriptions of regularities (though perhaps not of any regularity but only of the most basic or most general ones). There are significantly different variants of each account; and also positions that altogether deny the existence of general laws (or deny that science should aim to describe them).

Any one of these accounts, if it is ultimately to be coherent and defensible, has to successfully address four interrelated issues: the meaning of a law statement – the semantic issue; the fact to which a law statement refers and which makes it true – the metaphysical issue; the basis on which claims to know a law are justified – the epistemological issue; the capacity to explain adequately the variety and roles of scientific laws – the explanatory issue.

In attempting this task, each of the available accounts faces its own distinct difficulties. For example, if there are necessities in nature, as the first account claims, how exactly do we identify them: how can we tell which of the inductively confirmed regularities are laws? On the other hand, if there are only regularities, as the second account claims, does this mean that our intuitions and scientific practices are awry and that there really is no distinction between laws and accidental generalizations?

The difficulties facing all extant accounts become even more marked when we face up squarely to the surprisingly wide variety of (putative) laws supplied by current science and to the complexity of the relations between those putative laws and regularities and causes.
General relativity, philosophical responses to
Authors: Ryckman T.A.
Published: September 2018

Much of the early philosophical attention given Einstein’s theory of gravitation was not uncontaminated by a grim post-war atmosphere conducive to public diversions, hysteria and national chauvinism. Most was ill-informed regarding the mathematical and physical content of the theory. Even amongst the scientifically literate, there was disagreement as to the theory’s philosophical implications. In part, this lack of clarity is due to Einstein. In an endeavour to eliminate references to ‘absolute space’ as the earlier special (or, as it was then known, restricted) theory of relativity (STR) had eliminated reference to ‘absolute time’, Einstein had motivated his theory of gravitation as arising from an epistemologically mandated generalization of the relativity principle of STR, which governed only inertial motions, and he misleadingly baptized it a theory of ‘general relativity’, wherein all motions are regarded as relative to other bodies. This the theory does not show. Also, some incautiously expressed remarks on the formal requirement of general covariance were seized upon as evidence for antithetical epistemological and ontological attitudes. Amidst such confusions, it is not at all surprising that inherently antagonistic philosophical outlooks claimed vindication or confirmation by the general theory of relativity (GTR). In turn, the perceived failure of both Machian positivism and Neo-Kantianism to accommodate the revolutionary theory spurred the development of a new ‘scientific philosophy’, logical positivism. The subsequent course of philosophy of science in the twentieth century was indelibly marked by this development. Yet it would turn out that Einstein himself refused to be a cooperative exemplar for any of the major philosophical schools, positivism, Kantianism, or, to its embarrassment, logical positivism.
Maxwell, James Clerk (1831–79)
Authors: Everitt C.W.F.
Published: September 2018

For his two achievements of unifying electricity, magnetism and light, and of inventing statistical dynamics, Maxwell stands as the founding mind of modern theoretical physics. More than any other physicist’s his also was a mind shaped and informed by a training in philosophy, even though, unlike Heinrich Hertz or Ernst Mach, for example, he never wrote a philosophical treatise. Therein lies the point, however. Mach’s and Hertz’s best discoveries seem remote from their metaphysics, Maxwell’s are bound up with his. Particularly important philosophically are his interconnected uses of relation, analogy and classification. He is also responsible for introducing the word ‘relativity’ into physics, and for articulating the scientific problematic that led to Einstein’s theory.
Measurement, theory of
Authors: Suppes Patrick
Published: September 2018

A conceptual analysis of measurement can properly begin by formulating the two fundamental problems of any measurement procedure. The first problem is that of representation, justifying the assignment of numbers to objects or phenomena. We cannot literally take a number in our hands and ’apply’ it to a physical object. What we can show is that the structure of a set of phenomena under certain empirical operations and relations is the same as the structure of some set of numbers under corresponding arithmetical operations and relations. Solution of the representation problem for a theory of measurement does not completely lay bare the structure of the theory, for there is often a formal difference between the kind of assignment of numbers arising from different procedures of measurement. This is the second fundamental problem, determining the scale type of a given procedure.

Counting is an example of an absolute scale. The number of members of a given collection of objects is determined uniquely. In contrast, the measurement of mass or weight is an example of a ratio scale. An empirical procedure for measuring mass does not determine the unit of mass. The measurement of temperature is an example of an interval scale. The empirical procedure of measuring temperature by use of a thermometer determines neither a unit nor an origin. In this sort of measurement the ratio of any two intervals is independent of the unit and zero point of measurement.

Still another type of scale is one which is arbitrary except for order. Moh’s hardness scale, according to which minerals are ranked in regard to hardness as determined by a scratch test, and the Beaufort wind scale, whereby the strength of a wind is classified as calm, light air, light breeze, and so on, are examples of ordinal scales.

A distinction is made between those scales of measurement which are fundamental and those which are derived. A derived scale presupposes and uses the numerical results of at least one other scale. In contrast, a fundamental scale does not depend on others.

Another common distinction is that between extensive and intensive quantities or scales. For extensive quantities like mass or distance an empirical operation of combination can be given which has the structural properties of the numerical operation of addition. Intensive quantities do not have such an operation; typical examples are temperature and cardinal utility.

A widespread complaint about this classical foundation of measurement is that it takes too little account of the analysis of variability in the quantity measured. One important source is systematic variability in the empirical properties of the object being measured. Another source lies not in the object but in the procedures of measurement being used. There are also random errors which can arise from variability in the object, the procedures or the conditions surrounding the observations.
Medicine, philosophy of
Authors: Schaffner Kenneth F. , Engelhardt H. Tristram
Published: September 2018

The philosophy of medicine can be generally defined as encompassing those issues in epistemology, axiology, logic, methodology and metaphysics generated by or related to medicine. Issues have frequently focused on the nature of the practice of medicine, on concepts of health and disease, and on understanding the kind of knowledge that physicians employ in diagnosing and treating patients.

The history of philosophical reflections concerning medicine reaches back to ancient Greece. Medical knowledge took a further step in the nineteenth century with the introduction of clinical pathological correlations, statistical methods, and systematic experimentation, out of which grew substantive literature exploring the character of medical reasoning and the framing of diagnoses. Debates also developed over contrasting physiological, ontological, nominalist and realist accounts of disease entities.

Contemporary philosophy of medicine has been concerned with the nature of medicine in an increasingly scientific context, a concern that has generated several models of medicine, including George Engel’s biopsychosocial model, as well as analyses of the nature of the physician–patient interaction. The longstanding debate over the ontological status of health and disease has been recapitulated and extended by a number of authors, favouring an objective, statistically-based account, while others argue for an irreducible social and valuational element in these concepts. Several approaches to diagnostic logic, including Bayesian and computer-based analyses, have been developed, and sophisticated methods of determining disease causation and therapeutic efficacy, including analyses of the randomized clinical trial, have also been explored. Whether the philosophy of medicine is a distinct discipline or a branch of the philosophy of science has provoked vigorous arguments.
Meyerson, Émile (1859–1933)
Authors: Sipfle David A.
Published: September 2018

Meyerson rejects the positivism of Comte and Mach, insisting that reason demands more of science than the identification of lawful regularities for the purpose of successful prediction. Reason demands an actual representation of reality based on genuine causal explanation, and causal explanation consists of demonstrating an underlying identity behind the apparent diversity of phenomena. If completely successful, however, such explanation would ultimately lead to the unchanging homogeneous and sterile universe of Parmenides. That it does not is due to what Meyerson calls ‘irrationals’: inexplicable elements in reality that can never be reduced to identity. Explanation, therefore, is never complete, and scientific laws are ‘plausible’ rather than universally and necessarily true.
Naturalized philosophy of science
Authors: Giere Ronald N.
Published: September 2018

Naturalized philosophy of science is part of a general programme of naturalism in philosophy. Naturalists reject all forms of supernaturalism, holding that reality, including human life and culture, is exhausted by what exists in the causal order of nature. Naturalists also reject any claims to a priori knowledge, including that of principles of inference, holding instead that all knowledge derives from human interactions with the natural world. Philosophically, naturalists identify most closely with empiricism or pragmatism. David Hume was a naturalist. So was John Dewey. The logical empiricists were naturalists regarding fundamental ontological categories such as space, time and causality, but non-naturalists about scientific inference, which they came to regard as a branch of logic. Most naturalists now dismiss searches for ’philosophical foundations’ of the special sciences, treating the basic principles of any science as part of scientific theory itself.

The main objection to naturalism has been at the level of general methodological principles, particularly those regarding scientific inference. Here non-naturalists object that, being limited to ’describing’ how science is in fact practised, naturalists cannot provide norms for legitimate scientific inferences. And providing such norms is held to be one of the main goals of the philosophy of science. Naturalists reply that the only norms required for science are those connecting specific means with the assumed goals of research. These connections can be established only through further scientific research. And the choice of goals is, for naturalists, not a scientific question but a matter of practical choice guided by an empirical understanding of what can in fact be achieved.

Among naturalists, the main differences concern the relative importance of various aspects of the practice of science. These aspects exist at different levels: neurological, biological, psychological, personal, computational, methodological, social and cultural. Each of these levels has its champions among contemporary naturalists, some insisting that everything ultimately be reduced to their favourite level. Perhaps the wisest approach is to allow that influences at all levels are operative in any scientific context, while admitting that some influences may be more important than others in particular cases, depending on what one seeks to understand. There may be no simple, one-level, naturalistic theory of science.
Science, 19th century philosophy of
Authors: Butts Robert E.
Published: September 2018

In the nineteenth century, science was organized, it tested and confirmed positive knowledge of the natural world and achieved remarkable theoretical development and hitherto unimagined practical application. Science drove industry and free enterprise, and became a powerful catalyst in the battle between defenders of knowledge as power and advocates of knowledge as love.

Fruitful scientific theories and observations were plentiful. Darwin, Wallace and Spencer caused a revolution in biology. Faraday, Maxwell and Hertz contributed seminal ideas in electromagnetic theory. Hermann von Helmholtz studied the physiology of tones and discovered a principle of the conservation of force. Lyell’s efforts established geology as a science. Ernst Mach argued for the elimination of absolute space in favour of a space and time consisting of observable relations between things, thus providing incentive for Einstein’s theory of relativity. Sir John Herschel added many observed double stars to the growing catalogue of celestial bodies.

These and other observational, theoretical and applied achievements in nineteenth-century science were replete with philosophical consequences. Until the nineteenth century natural philosophy and science coexisted as a single discipline. Now science and traditional philosophy drew apart. Some held that henceforth science would deal with the world revealed in experience, and philosophy with the world existing (if any does) beyond what we experience. Others (including prominent scientists) were unwilling to yield to philosophy licence to speculate beyond the limits of what could be ascertained by means of observation and experimentation: even if science and philosophy were no longer one unified intellectual enterprise, philosophy had a substantial role to play in philosophizing about science.

To satisfy changing expectations, a new intellectual discipline was created in the nineteenth century: the philosophy of science. Unlike previous philosophy, whose subject matter was everything that is (or is not), the philosophy of science had a distinct and determinate subject matter: theoretical texts and experimental and observational reports of scientists (the word ‘scientist’ having been invented by William Whewell).

Theoretical scientific systems and their logical structure were one focus of attention. Science was also said to discover laws. Were such laws timeless and exceptionless truths about nature, or simply convenient, economical ways of cataloguing information? These laws were discovered (or invented) generalizations that provided tested information about nature. This discovery and confirmation relied upon the method of induction – thought by most nineteenth-century philosophers of science to have a logic – to involve decisions concerning the validity or invalidity of inferences based on knowledge from experience. Was this alleged logic trustworthy? These questions exemplify the complex problems concerning the epistemic reliability of scientific explanation.
Geology, philosophy of
Authors: Laudan Rachel
Published: September 2018

In the mid-1960s, geology underwent a conceptual revolution. Prior to that time, most geologists believed that the continents and oceans were fixed and permanent, the basic features of the earth’s crust. Subsequently they came to agree that the earth was covered by rigid plates, thin in relation to the earth’s diameter, in which the continents were embedded like logs in icebergs. It was the creation, movement and destruction of these plates that were responsible for the mid-ocean ridges, the areas of mountain building and earthquake activity, and the deep ocean trenches.

This conceptual revolution also marks a shift in the philosophy of geology. From the early nineteenth century, the chief philosophical question posed by geology was whether a historical science encountered special epistemic problems, a question that was usually answered by invoking the principle of uniformitarianism. In its strict form this stated that the only kind and intensities of causes that could be used to explain past geological phenomena were those that could be directly observed. Many sloppier formulations were invoked under the same name. Since the revolution, philosophers have turned to geology chiefly to use the revolution to exemplify or challenge one or another theory of scientific change.
Quantum mechanics, interpretation of
Authors: Stairs Allen
Published: September 2018

Quantum mechanics developed in the early part of the twentieth century in response to the discovery that energy is quantized, that is, comes in discrete units. At the microscopic level this leads to odd phenomena: light displays particle-like characteristics and particles such as electrons produce wave-like interference patterns. At the level of ordinary objects such effects are usually not evident, but this generalization is subject to striking exceptions and puzzling ambiguities.

The fundamental quantum mechanical puzzle is ’superposition of states’. Quantum states can be added together in a manner that recalls the superposition of waves, but the effects of quantum superposition show up only probabilistically in the statistics of many measurements. The details suggest that the world is indefinite in odd ways; for example, that things may not always have well-defined positions or momenta or energies. However, if we accept this conclusion, we have difficulty making sense of such straightforward facts as that measurements have definite results.

Interpretations of quantum mechanics are, in one way or another, attempts to understand the superposition of quantum states. The range of interpretations stretches from the metaphysically daring to the seemingly innocuous. But, so far, no single interpretation has commanded anything like universal agreement.
Space
Authors: Torretti Roberto
Published: September 2018

In some of its uses, the word ‘space’ designates an empty or potentially empty expanse among things, for example, when a driver finds a space in a crowded parking lot, or when a typesetter increases the space between words on a page. In other uses, ‘space’ is meant to stand for a boundless extension which supposedly contains everything, or every thing of a certain sort. The former sense is well-grounded in ordinary experience and can be traced back to the etymology of the word (from the Latin word spatium, meaning ‘race-track’, or generally ‘distance’, ‘interval’, ‘terrain’). The latter sense originated in scholarly circles – possibly as late as the fourteenth century – by a bold extrapolation of the former; it does not refer to anything that can be exhibited in sense-perception; and yet, through the influence of Newtonian science on Euro-American common sense, it has become so entrenched in ordinary usage that it is normally viewed as the primary meaning of ‘space’, from which all others are derived.

According to Cornford, the ‘invention of space’ as a boundless, all-encompassing container happened in the fifth century bc. However, it is more likely to have occurred in the late Middle Ages. At any rate, the idea was rampant in Cambridge in the 1660s, when Newton made it a fundamental ingredient in his framework for the description of the phenomena of motion. In a posthumous paper, Newton stressed that space evades the traditional classification of entities into substances and attributes, and has ‘its own manner of existence’. Until the publication of this paper in 1962, philosophers took Newtonian space for a substance, and most of them thought this to be utterly absurd. In view of the role of all-encompassing space in Newtonian physics, Kant opted for regarding it as a precondition of human knowledge, contributed once and for all by the human mind. Newton had written that the points of space owe their individual identity to the relational system in which they are set. Nineteenth-century mathematicians vastly extended this concept of space by conceiving many such relational systems. They thus made it possible for relativity theory to substitute four-dimensional spacetime for Newtonian space and time, and for current string theory to countenance a ten-dimensional physical space. These developments confirm the productivity, but not the fixity, of the knowing mind.
Species
Authors: Sterelny Kim
Published: September 2018

The diversity of life is not seamless but comes in relatively discrete packages, species. Is that packaging real, or an artefact of our limited temporal perspective on the history of life? If all living forms are descended from one or a few ancestors, there may be no real distinction between living and ancestral forms, or between closely related living animals.

Received wisdom holds that species are the ’units of evolution’, for it is they that evolve. They are the upshot of evolutionary processes, but, if species and not just their component organisms compete with one another, they are also important agents in the evolutionary process. If so, species are real units in nature, not arbitrary segmentations of seamless variation.

The ’species problem’ has been approached from two angles. One focus has been on specific taxa of the tree of life. What would settle whether some arbitrarily chosen organism is a member of homo sapiens or canis familiaris? This is sometimes known as the ’species taxon’ problem. An alternate way of approaching diversity has been to ask what all species have in common. What do all the populations we think of as species share? This is the ’species category’ problem.

One idea is to group organisms into species by appealing to the overall similarity. This ’phenetic’ conception is in retreat. Most contemporary species definitions are relational, the animals that compose pan troglodytes are a species, not because they are all very similar (they are very like the pygmy chimps as well) but because of their relations amongst themselves and with their ancestors. The most famous relational definition is the ’biological species concept’, according to which conspecific organisms are organisms that can interbreed, however different they look.

Relational species definitions aim to define a category of theoretical and explanatory interest to evolutionary and ecological theory. Given that there are many explanatory interests, one problem in evaluating these accounts is to determine whether they are genuinely rivals.
Time travel
Authors: Horwich Paul
Published: September 2018

The prospect of a machine in which one could be transported through time is no longer mere fantasy, having become in this century the subject of serious scientific and philosophical debate. From Einstein’s special theory of relativity we have learned that a form of time travel into the future may be accomplished by moving quickly, and therefore ageing slowly (exploiting the time dilation effect). And in 1949 Kurt Gödel announced his discovery of (general relativistic) spacetimes whose global curvature allows voyages into the past as well. Since then the study of time travel has had three main strands. First, there has been research by theoretical physicists into the character and plausibility of structures, beyond those found by Gödel, that could engender closed timelike lines and closed causal chains. These phenomena include rotating universes, black holes, traversable wormholes and infinite cosmic strings (Earman 1995). Second, there has been concern with the semantic issue of whether the terms ‘cause’, ‘time’ and ‘travel’ are applicable, strictly speaking, to such bizarre models, given how different they are from the contexts in which those terms are normally employed (Yourgrau 1993). However, one may be sceptical about the significance of this issue, since the questions of primary interest – focused on the nature and reality of the Gödel-style models – seem independent of whether their description requires a shift in the meanings of those words. And, third, there has been considerable discussion within both physics and philosophy of various alleged paradoxes of time travel, and of their power to preclude the spacetime models in which time travel could occur.
Vitalism
Authors: Bechtel William , Richardson Robert C.
Published: September 2018

Vitalists hold that living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things. In its simplest form, vitalism holds that living entities contain some fluid, or a distinctive ‘spirit’. In more sophisticated forms, the vital spirit becomes a substance infusing bodies and giving life to them; or vitalism becomes the view that there is a distinctive organization among living things. Vitalist positions can be traced back to antiquity. Aristotle’s explanations of biological phenomena are sometimes thought of as vitalistic, though this is problematic. In the third century bc, the Greek anatomist Galen held that vital spirits are necessary for life. Vitalism is best understood, however, in the context of the emergence of modern science during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Mechanistic explanations of natural phenomena were extended to biological systems by Descartes and his successors. Descartes maintained that animals, and the human body, are ‘automata’, mechanical devices differing from artificial devices only in their degree of complexity. Vitalism developed as a contrast to this mechanistic view. Over the next three centuries, numerous figures opposed the extension of Cartesian mechanism to biology, arguing that matter could not explain movement, perception, development or life. Vitalism has fallen out of favour, though it had advocates even into the twentieth century. The most notable is Hans Driesch (1867–1941), an eminent embryologist, who explained the life of an organism in terms of the presence of an entelechy, a substantial entity controlling organic processes. Likewise, the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1874–1948) posited an élan vital to overcome the resistance of inert matter in the formation of living bodies.