bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Mechanics, classical
Authors: Wilson Mark
Published: September 2018

Understood at its most general, ‘classical mechanics’ covers the approach to physical phenomena that dominated science from roughly the time of Galileo until the early decades of the twentieth century. The approach is usually characterized by the assumption that bodies carry an inherent mass and well-defined positions and velocities. Bodies subsist within a three-dimensional absolute space and influence one another through reciprocal forces. These objects obey the three laws of motion articulated by Isaac Newton in 1686 in a deterministic manner: once a mechanical system is assembled, its future behaviour is rigidly fixed. Such ‘classical’ assumptions were eventually rejected by Einstein’s theory of relativity, where the assumption of a three-dimensional Euclidean space is abandoned, and by quantum mechanics, where determinism and well-defined positions and velocity are eschewed.

Classical mechanics is frequently characterized as ‘billiard ball mechanics’ or ‘the theory of mechanism’ on the grounds that the science treats its materials in the manner of colliding particles, or clockwork. Such stereotypes should be approached with caution because the basic framework of classical mechanics has long been subject to divergent interpretations that unpack the content of Newton’s ‘three laws’ in remarkably different ways. These differing interpretations provide incompatible catalogues of the basic objects that are supposed to comprise the ‘classical world’ – are they point masses, rigid bodies or flexible substances? Or, as many writers have suggested, should mechanics not be regarded as ‘about’ the world at all, but merely as a source of useful but fictitious idealizations of reality?

These foundational disagreements explain why classical mechanics has often found itself entangled in metaphysics. Much of modern philosophy of science is characterized by attitudes that were originally articulated during the nineteenth century’s attempts to clarify the grounds of classical mechanics.
Models
Authors: Lloyd Elisabeth A.
Published: September 2018

Of the many kinds of things that serve as ‘models’, all function fundamentally as representations of what we wish to understand or to be or to do. Model aeroplanes and other scale models share selected structural properties with their originals, while differing in other properties, such as construction materials and size. Analogue models, which resemble their originals in some aspect of structure or internal relations, are important in the sciences, because they can facilitate inferences about complicated or obscure natural systems. A collection of billiard balls in random motion is an analogue model of an ideal gas; the interactions and motions of the billiard balls are taken to represent – to be analogous to – the interactions and motions of molecules in the gas.

In mathematical logic, a model is a structure – an arrangement of objects – which represents a theory expressed as a set of sentences. The various terms of the sentences of the theory are mapped onto objects and their relations in the structure; a model is a structure that makes all of the sentences in the theory true. This specialized notion of model has been adopted by philosophers of science; on a ‘structuralist’ or ‘semantic’ conception, scientific theories are understood as structures which are used to represent real systems in nature. Philosophical debates have arisen regarding the precise extent of the resemblances between scientific models and the natural systems they represent.
Molecular biology
Authors: Dietrich Michael R.
Published: September 2018

Molecular biology is the study of the structure, function and kinetics of biologically important molecules. Historically, molecular biology has often been identified with molecular genetics. Similarly, the chief philosophical concern with molecular biology has been the possibility of the reduction of classical genetics to molecular genetics. The nature and boundaries of molecular biology, however, are themselves disputed. To some, molecular biology seems to be a morass of molecular details without any overarching theory. To others molecular biology is an integrated interlevel theory. How philosophical issues, such as reduction, are addressed can depend importantly on how molecular biology is initially characterized.
Operationalism
Authors: Suppe Frederick
Published: September 2018

‘Operationalism’, coined by the physicist Percy W. Bridgman (1927), has come to designate a loosely connected body of similar but conflicting views about how scientific theories or concepts are connected to reality or observation via various measurement and other procedures. Examples of an operation would be the procedure of laying a standard yardstick along the edge of a surface to measure length or using psychometric tests to measure sexual orientation. In the 1920–50s different versions of operationalism were produced by, amongst others: Bridgman, who was concerned with the ontology of basic units in physics; behaviourists such as E.C. Tolman, S.S. Stevens, who were concerned with the measurement of intervening variables or hypothetical constructs not accessible to direct observation, as well as B.F. Skinner, who sought to eliminate such nonobservables; and positivistic philosophers of science who were analysing the meaning of terms in scientific language. Conflation of their different operationalist philosophies has led to a great deal of nonsense about operational definition, methodology of observation and experiment, and the meaning of scientific concepts. Operationalist doctrines were most influential in the social sciences, and today the primary legacy is the practice of operationally defining abstract social science concepts as measurable variables.
Optics
Authors: Jones Roger
Published: September 2018

Optics as physics concerned with the manipulation and study of light and, more recently, the general study of electromagnetic radiation, has a history back to ancient Egypt, and systematic study to classical Greece. But physics has proved better able to manipulate light than to explain its fundamental nature.

‘Geometrical optics’ treats light as a bundle of discrete rays, tracing their rectilinear paths reflected from surfaces and refracted through transparent media. ‘Physical optics’ treats light as a wave. It explains the dispersion of white light into spectral colours, the bands and colour patterns of diffraction phenomena, and aspects of the absorption and scattering of light. Characterizing the way in which the physical aspects of light become the perceptual aspects of shape and colour joins physics, physiology and philosophy in the perennial question of the correspondence of our perceptions to the physical world itself.

A modern view of light describes it in terms of massless particulate photons. This ‘quantum optics’ treats the absorption and emission of light by matter; providing precise knowledge of matter’s inner structure, and the technology of lasers. Philosophically, quantum optics has led to the fundamental question: what is light? What is this natural entity which is created and destroyed in a particle-like way and yet propagates through space – and lenses, holes and slits – in a wave-like way? Experiments in which individual photons interfere with themselves make it hard to think of them as having unique paths. Experiments involving the correlation of photon properties threaten attempts to describe photons as having individual properties and interacting only locally.
Planck, Max Karl Ernst Ludwig (1858–1947)
Authors: Howard Don
Published: September 2018

Planck was a German theoretical physicist and leader of the German physics community in the first half of the twentieth century. Famous for his introduction of the quantum hypothesis in physics, Planck was also a prolific writer on popular-scientific and philosophical topics. Even more so than his younger contemporary Albert Einstein, Planck was well-known in his day for his defence of a realist conception of science and his explicit criticism of the positivism of Ernst Mach and the Vienna Circle.
Randomness
Authors: Dembski William A.
Published: September 2018

The fundamental intuition underlying randomness is the absence of order or pattern. To cash out this intuition philosophers and scientists employ five approaches to randomness.

(1) Randomness as the output of a chance process. Thus an event is random if it is the output of a chance process. Moreover, a sequence of events constitutes a random sample if all events in the sequence derive from a single chance process and no event in the sequence is influenced by the others.

(2) Randomness as mimicking chance. Statisticians frequently wish to obtain a random sample (in the sense of (1)) according to some specified probability distribution. Unfortunately, a chance process corresponding to this probability distribution may be hard to come by. In this case a statistician may employ a computer simulation to mimic the desired chance process (for example, a random number generator). Randomness qua mimicking chance is also known as pseudo-randomness.

(3) Randomness via mixing. Consider the following situation: particles are concentrated in some corner of a fluid; forces act on the fluid so that eventually the particles become thoroughly mixed throughout the fluid, reaching an equilibrium state. Here randomness is identified with the equilibrium state reached via mixing.

(4) Randomness as a measure of computational complexity. Computers are ideally suited for generating bit strings. The length of the shortest program that generates a given bit string, as well as the minimum time it takes for a program to generate the string, both assign measures of complexity to the strings. The higher the complexity, the more random the string.

(5) Randomness as pattern-breaking. Given a specified collection of patterns, an object is random if it breaks all the patterns in the collection. If, on the other hand, it fits at least one of the patterns in the collection, then it fails to be random.
Reduction, problems of
Authors: Kim Jaegwon
Published: September 2018

Reduction is a procedure whereby a given domain of items (for example, objects, properties, concepts, laws, facts, theories, languages, and so on) is shown to be either absorbable into, or dispensable in favour of, another domain. When this happens, the one domain is said to be ‘reduced’ to the other. For example, it has been claimed that numbers can be reduced to sets (and hence number theory to set theory), that chemical properties like solubility in water or valence have been reduced to properties of molecules and atoms, and that laws of optics are reducible to principles of electromagnetic theory. When one speaks of ‘reductionism’, one has in mind a specific claim to the effect that a particular domain (for example, the mental) is reducible to another (for example, the biological, the computational). The expression is sometimes used to refer to a global thesis to the effect that all the special sciences, for example chemistry, biology, psychology, are reducible ultimately to fundamental physics. Such a view is also known as the doctrine of the ‘unity of science’.
Risk assessment
Authors: Shrader-Frechette Kristin
Published: September 2018

Probabilistic or quantitative risk assessment (QRA) aims to identify, estimate and evaluate a variety of threats to human health and safety. These threats arise primarily from particular technologies (such as commercial nuclear fission) or from environmental impacts (such as deforestation). Defined in terms of the probability that some consequence will occur, ‘risk’ typically is expressed as the average annual probability of fatality that a particular activity imposes on one individual. For example, because of normal lifetime exposure to dichloromethane (DCM), a multipurpose solvent, the average member of the public has an annual probability of dying from cancer of 0.0000041 or (4.1×10−6). Or, for every million persons exposed to DCM throughout their lifetimes, on average the chemical will cause four cancer deaths each year.

Although risks may be individual (such as those from consuming saturated fats) or societal (such as those from liquified natural gas facilities), government typically regulates only societal risks. By definition, they are largely involuntarily imposed, whereas individual risks affect only the persons voluntarily choosing them. Most QRAs address societal risks, either because a government seeks a scientific basis for particular risk regulations, because some industry wishes to determine possible liability for its processes or products, or because actual or potential victims want to protect themselves or to allocate risks by means other than market mechanisms.

Philosophical contributions to QRA are of three main types: assessments of particular risks, criticisms of existing assessments, and clarifications of important QRA concepts, methods or theories. Such contributions usually focus on either epistemology (including philosophy of science) or ethics. Epistemological analyses address, for example, the adequacy and appropriateness of some scientific, probabilistic or policy technique used in QRA; the status of a specific causal hypothesis about risk; or the rationality of alternative decision rules for evaluating risks. Ethical analyses investigate, for instance, the equity of the risk distributions presupposed in a specific QRA or by general QRA methodology; the degree to which a particular method of risk evaluation accounts for crucial social values, such as free informed consent and due process; and the extent to which a given QRA technique, such as discounting the future (see Parfit 1983), begs important ethical questions such as rights of future generations.
Scientific method
Authors: Hatfield Gary
Published: September 2018

Procedures for attaining scientific knowledge are known as scientific methods. These methods include formulating theories and testing them against observation or experiment. Ancient and medieval thinkers called any systematic body of knowledge a ‘science’, and their methods were aimed at knowledge in general. According to the most common model for scientific knowledge, formulated by Aristotle, induction yields universal propositions from which all knowledge in a field can be deduced. This model was refined by medieval and early modern thinkers, and further developed in the nineteenth century by Whewell and Mill.

As Kuhn observed, idealized accounts of scientific method must be distinguished from descriptions of what scientists actually do. The methods of careful observation and experiment have been in use from antiquity, but became more widespread after the seventeenth century. Developments in instrument making, in mathematics and statistics, in terminology, and in communication technology have altered the methods and the results of science.
Scientific realism and antirealism
Authors: Fine Arthur
Published: September 2018

Traditionally, scientific realism asserts that the objects of scientific knowledge exist independently of the minds or acts of scientists and that scientific theories are true of that objective (mind-independent) world. The reference to knowledge points to the dual character of scientific realism. On the one hand it is a metaphysical (specifically, an ontological) doctrine, claiming the independent existence of certain entities. On the other hand it is an epistemological doctrine asserting that we can know what individuals exist and that we can find out the truth of the theories or laws that govern them.

Opposed to scientific realism (hereafter just ‘realism’) are a variety of antirealisms, including phenomenalism and empiricism. Recently two others, instrumentalism and constructivism, have posed special challenges to realism. Instrumentalism regards the objects of knowledge pragmatically, as tools for various human purposes, and so takes reliability (or empirical adequacy) rather than truth as scientifically central. A version of this, fictionalism, contests the existence of many of the objects favoured by the realist and regards them as merely expedient means to useful ends. Constructivism maintains that scientific knowledge is socially constituted, that ‘facts’ are made by us. Thus it challenges the objectivity of knowledge, as the realist understands objectivity, and the independent existence that realism is after. Conventionalism, holding that the truths of science ultimately rest on man-made conventions, is allied to constructivism.

Realism and antirealism propose competing interpretations of science as a whole. They even differ over what requires explanation, with realism demanding that more be explained and antirealism less.
Simplicity (in scientific theories)
Authors: Sober Elliott
Published: September 2018

In evaluating which of several competing hypotheses is most plausible, scientists often use simplicity as a guide. This raises three questions: what makes one hypothesis simpler than another? Why should a difference in simplicity make a difference in what we believe? And how much weight should simplicity receive, compared with other considerations, in judging a hypothesis’ plausibility? These may be termed the descriptive, the normative, and the weighting problems, respectively. The aesthetic and pragmatic appeal of more simple theories is transparent; the puzzle is how simplicity can be a guide to truth.
Sociobiology
Authors: Rosenberg Alex
Published: September 2018

Following Darwin, biologists and social scientists have periodically been drawn to the theory of natural selection as the source of explanatory insights about human behaviour and social institutions. The combination of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian theory, which did so much to substantiate the theory of evolution in the life sciences, however, has made recurrent adoption of a biological approach to the social sciences controversial. Excesses and errors in social Darwinism, eugenics and mental testing have repeatedly exposed evolutionary approaches in the human sciences to criticism.

Sociobiology is the version of Darwinism in social and behavioural science that became prominent in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Philosophical problems of sociobiology include challenges to the explanatory relevance of Darwinian theory for human behaviour and social institutions, controversies about whether natural selection operates at levels of organization above or below the individual, questions about the meaning of the nature–nurture distinction, and disputes about Darwinism’s implications for moral philosophy.
Statistics
Authors: Woodward James
Published: September 2018

The discipline of statistics encompasses an extremely broad and heterogeneous set of problems and techniques. We deal here with the problems of statistical inference, which have to do with inferring from a body of sample data (for example, the observed results of tossing a coin or of drawing a number of balls at random from an urn containing balls of different colours) to some feature of the underlying distribution from which the sample is drawn (for example, the probability of heads when the coin is tossed, or the relative proportion of red balls in the urn).

There are two conflicting approaches to the foundations of statistical inference. The classical tradition derives from ideas of Ronald Fisher, Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson and embodies the standard treatments of hypothesis testing, confidence intervals and estimation found in many statistics textbooks. Classicists adopt a relative-frequency conception of probability and, except in special circumstances, eschew the assignment of probabilities to hypotheses, seeking instead a rationale for statistical inference in facts about the error characteristics of testing procedures. By contrast, the Bayesian tradition, so-called because of the central role it assigns to Bayes’ theorem, adopts a subjective or degree-of-belief conception of probability and represents the upshot of a statistical inference as a claim about how probable a statistical hypothesis is in the light of the evidence.
Taxonomy
Authors: Hull David L.
Published: September 2018

The fundamental elements of any classification are its theoretical commitments, basic units and the criteria for ordering these basic units into a classification. Two fundamentally different sorts of classification are those that reflect structural organization and those that are systematically related to historical development.

In biological classification, evolution supplies the theoretical orientation. The goal is to make the basic units of classification (taxonomic species) identical to the basic units of biological evolution (evolutionary species). The principle of order is supplied by phylogeny. Species splitting successively through time produce a phylogenetic tree. The primary goal of taxonomy since Darwin has been to reflect these successive splittings in a hierarchical classification made up of species, genera, families, and so on.

The major point of contention in taxonomy is epistemological. A recurrent complaint against classifications that attempt to reflect phylogeny is that phylogeny cannot be ‘known’ with certainty sufficient to warrant using it as the object of classification. Instead, small but persistent groups of taxonomists have insisted that classifications be more ‘operational’. Instead of attempting to reflect something as difficult to infer as phylogeny, advocates of this position contend that systematists should stick more closely to observational reality.
Technology, philosophy of
Authors: Kroes Peter
Published: September 2018

The philosophy of technology deals with the nature of technology and its effects on human life and society. The increasing influence of modern technology on human existence has triggered a growing interest in a philosophical analysis of technology. Nevertheless, the philosophy of technology as a coherent field of research does not yet exist. The subject covers studies from almost every branch of thinking in philosophy and deals with a great variety of topics because of a lack of consensus about the primary meaning of the term ‘technology’, which may, among others, refer to a collection of artifacts, a form of human action, a form of knowledge or a social process.

Among the most fundamental issues are two demarcation problems directly related to the definition of technology. The first concerns the distinction between technological (artificial) and natural objects. It involves the relation between man, nature and culture. The second pertains to the distinction between science and technology as types of knowledge. The science–technology relationship has become of central importance because of the widespread assumption that the distinguishing feature of modern technology, as compared to traditional forms of technology, is that it is science-based. Another much discussed issue is the autonomy of technology. It deals with the question of whether technology follows its own inevitable course of development, irrespective of its social, political, economic and cultural context.
Thermodynamics
Authors: Sklar Lawrence
Published: September 2018

Thermodynamics began as the science that elucidated the law-like order present in the behaviour of heat and in its transformations to and from mechanical work. It became of interest to philosophers of science when the nature of heat was discovered to be that of the hidden energy of motion of the microscopic constituents of matter.

Attempts at accounting for the phenomenological laws of heat that make up thermodynamics on the basis of the so-called kinetic theory of heat gave rise to the first fundamental introduction into physics of probabilistic concepts and of probabilistic explanation. This led to so-called statistical mechanics.

Some of the issues of thermodynamics with importance to philosophers are: the meaning of the probabilistic claims made in statistical mechanics; the nature of the probabilistic explanations it proffers for the observed macroscopic phenomena; the structure of the alleged reduction of thermodynamic theory to the theory of the dynamics of the underlying microscopic constituents of matter; the place of cosmological posits in explaining the behaviour of local systems; and the alleged reducibility of our very notion of the asymmetry of time to thermodynamic asymmetries of systems in time.
Thought experiments
Authors: Gooding David C.
Published: September 2018

Thought experiments are strange: they have the power to present surprising results and can profoundly change the way we view the world, all without requiring us to examine the world in the way that ordinary scientific experiments do. Philosophers who view all hypothetical reasoning as a form of thought experimentation regard the method as being as old as philosophy itself. Others maintain that truly informative thought experiments are found only in mathematics and the natural sciences. These emerged in the seventeenth century when the new experimental science of Bacon, Boyle, Galileo, Newton and others forced a distinction between the passive observation of Aristotelian mental narratives and the active interventions of real-world experiment. The new science gave rise to a philosophical puzzle: how can mere thought be so informative about the world? Rationalists argue that thought experiments are exercises in which thought apprehends laws of nature and mathematical truths directly. Empiricists argue that thought experiments are not exercises of ‘mere thought’ because they actually rely upon hidden empirical information – otherwise they would not count as experiments at all. More recently it has been argued that thought experiments are not mysterious because they are constructed arguments that are embedded in the world so as to combine logical and conceptual analysis with relevant features of the world.
Wallace, Alfred Russel (1823–1913)
Authors: Beddall Barbara G.
Published: September 2018

Co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of the theory of natural selection, Wallace travelled to the Amazon in 1848. Four years of collecting specimens there for sale in Europe revealed patterns of geographical distribution among animals. Unfortunately, much of his South American collection was lost in a fire at sea during the voyage home, which forced him to begin his collecting anew. This led to eight more years of travel (1854–62), this time in the Malay Archipelago, where he made his own momentous discovery of the theory of natural selection in 1858. An exceptionally clear thinker, he made many valuable contributions to evolutionary thought.
Underdetermination
Authors: Laudan Larry
Published: September 2018

The term underdetermination refers to a broad family of arguments about the relations between theory and evidence. All share the conclusion that evidence is more or less impotent to guide choice between rival theories or hypotheses. In one or other of its guises, underdetermination has probably been the most potent and most pervasive idea driving twentieth-century forms of scepticism and epistemological relativism. It figures prominently in the writing of diverse influential philosophers. It is a complex family of doctrines, each with a different argumentative structure. Most, however, suppose that only the logical consequences of a hypothesis are relevant to its empirical support. This supposition can be challenged.
Evolution and religion
Authors: Kitcher Philip
Published: September 2018

Ever since the seventeenth century, there has been debate about the compatibility of scientific findings and religious doctrines. During this period, many devout people have held that science and religion are fully compatible. With the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, however, the consistency of evolution and Christian religion has been an especially contested case. In particular, beliefs about the soul, beliefs about providence, and beliefs in supernatural powers and beings have been at the centre of the debate. But it has often happened that certain beliefs have been thought to be in conflict with Darwinism specifically, when the potential conflict is really with any naturalized scientific approach to biology and to the formation of human beliefs. Besides, there are different types of religion and religious commitment, and the problems involved in this debate are more acute for some than for others.
Natural selection and adaptation
Authors: Lewens Tim
Published: September 2018

Students of the natural world have long remarked on the fact that animals and plants are well suited to the demands of their environments. ‘Adaptation’, as it is used in modern biology, can name both the process by which organisms acquire this functional match, and the products of that process. Eyes, wings, beaks, camouflaging skin pigmentation and so forth, are all ‘adaptations’ in this second sense. Modern biological orthodoxy follows Darwin in giving a central role to natural selection in explaining the production of adaptations such as these. This much is uncontroversial. But a number of more contentious conceptual questions are raised when we look in more detail at the relationship between natural selection and adaptation. One of these questions concerns how we should define adaptation. It is tempting to characterize adaptations as functional traits – eyes are for seeing, large beaks are for cracking tough seed-casings. This in turn has led many commentators in biology and philosophy to define adaptations as those traits which have been shaped by natural selection for their respective tasks. Others – especially biologists – have complained that such a definition trivializes Darwin’s claim that natural selection explains adaptation. This claim was meant to be an important discovery, not a definitional consequence of the meaning of ‘adaptation’. These worries naturally lead on to the issues of how natural selection itself is to be understood, how it is meant to explain adaptation, and how it should be distinguished from other important evolutionary processes. These topics have a historical dimension: is Darwin’s understanding of natural selection, and its relationship to adaptation, the same as that of today’s evolutionary biology? Textbook presentations often say yes, and this is surely legitimate if we make the comparison in broad terms. But differences emerge when we look in more detail. Darwin, for example, seems to make the ‘struggle for existence’ an essential element of natural selection. It is not clear whether this is the case in modern presentations. And Darwin’s presentation is largely neutral on the inheritance mechanism that accounts for parent/offspring resemblance, while modern presentations sometimes insist that natural selection always implies a genetic underpinning to inheritance.
Cultural evolution
Authors: Mameli Matteo , Sterelny Kim
Published: September 2018

Cultural traits are those phenotypic traits whose development depends on social learning. These include practices, skills, beliefs, desires, values, and artefacts. The distribution of cultural traits in the human species changes over time. But this is not enough to show that culture evolves. That depends on the mechanisms of change. In the cultural realm, one can often observe something similar to biology’s ‘descent with modification’: cultural traits are sometimes modified, their modifications are sometimes retained and passed on to others through social learning, until new modifications are added. In this way, new modifications are piled on top of old modifications, generating cumulative change. But, again, this is not enough to show that culture evolves. For culture to evolve, cumulative change must be the result of hidden-hand mechanisms similar to those that explain cumulative biological change. If cumulative cultural change cannot be explained in these terms, the analogy between cultural change and biological evolution is unhelpful. The best-known biological mechanism is natural selection. There are reasons to think that cultural change is at least sometimes due to natural-selection-like mechanisms. The adaptive fit often found between cultural traits and the environment in many cases has been built gradually and in a way that involves natural selection operating at the cultural level. The parallel with morphological adaptation is compelling. No complete and universally accepted account of natural-selection-like processes operating at the cultural level exists at this stage. But at least three kinds of processes seem possible:

- A natural-selection-like process can be generated by culturally heritable differences in fitness between individuals.

- A natural-selection-like process can be generated by culturally heritable differences in fitness between groups.

- A natural-selection-like process can operate at the level of cultural variants themselves, independently of the effects that cultural variants have on the fitness of individuals or groups.

The theory of memes (initially presented by Dawkins and then developed by Dennett) is one possible account of how (iii) might work; but other accounts exist too.
Mechanism, in modern philosophy
Authors: MacIntosh Jack
Published: September 2018

Mechanism is the view that the material world is composed of small particles (corpuscles, or atoms), whose motion, size, shape, and various arrangements and clusterings provide the theoretical background for the explanation of all happenings in the physical universe. Early modern authors, whether mechanists or not, assumed that the matter composing these particles was one and the same throughout the universe. With very few exceptions, they also assumed that there were immaterial entities such as human minds (or souls) and angels.

This view, which became the dominant one during the seventeenth century, had earlier precursors, both in classical times and in the Renaissance period, but the major earlier view, following Aristotle, explained the behaviour of material things in virtue of their form or nature: snow was white because it was the kind of thing that was white: it was the nature of snow to be white.

By this ‘way of dispatching difficulties, they make it very easy to solve All the Phænomena of Nature in Generall, but make men think it impossible to explicate almost Any of them in Particular’, said Robert Boyle, adding that it was only the ‘Comprehensive Principles of the Corpuscularian Philosophy’ which would allow unmysterious explanations of physical phenomena (Boyle 1999, 5: 300–1).

However, many of the things mechanism was invoked to explain – gravity and magnetism, for example – remained inexplicable on simple mechanistic accounts. Nonetheless, one important and lasting result of ‘the mechanical philosophy’ was the acceptance of the requirement that all explanations be understandable, that is, explicable in terms of elementary particles and their motion. In the hands of thinkers such as Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, and Newton this led to a reliance on experience and experiment, often controlled and quantified experiments, in place of the older, Aristotelian, model which viewed science as involving the deduction of necessary, universal, truths, from premises which were themselves necessary.
Behaviourism in the social sciences
Authors: Harre Rom
Published: September 2018

Classical behaviourism has had almost no direct reflection in the social sciences, in that there has never been a behaviourist social psychology or sociology. However, various features of the cluster of behaviourist doctrines have been widespread in the human sciences. Behaviourism as it developed from its roots in the proposals of Watson, and in its transformation by Skinner, had two influential aspects, one metaphysical and the other methodological. The metaphysics of behaviourism was positivistic. It was hostile to theory, favouring a psychology the subject matter of which was limited to stimuli and responses. It was hospitable to the conception of causation as regular concomitance of events, rejecting any generative or agent causal concepts. The methodology of behaviourism was hospitable to simple experimental techniques of inquiry, seeking statistical relations between independent and dependent variables. It was hostile to descriptions of human action that incorporated the intentions of the actor, favouring a laconic vocabulary of neologisms. Metaphysically and methodologically behaviourism favoured the individual as the locus of psychological phenomena. But, in practice, the use of statistical analyses of data abstracted psychological processes from real human beings leaving only simplified automata in their place.
Nature and convention
Authors: Soper Kate
Published: September 2018

The nature–convention distinction opposes instinctual or ‘spontaneous’ modes of comportment (those which follow from ‘human nature’) to those which are socially instituted or culturally prescribed. Its philosophic interest resides in its use to justify or contest specific forms of human behaviour and social organization. Since the ‘conventional’ is opposed to the ‘natural’ as that which is in principle transformable, the adherents of a particular order in human affairs have standardly sought to prove its ‘naturality’, while its critics have sought to expose its merely ‘conventional’ status. Relatedly, ‘conventions’ may be associated with what is distinctive to ‘human’, as opposed to ‘bestial’ nature, or denounced for their role in repressing our more ‘natural’ impulses.
History, philosophy of
Authors: Graham Gordon
Published: September 2018

Philosophy of history is the application of philosophical conceptions and analysis to history in both senses, the study of the past and the past itself. Like most branches of philosophy its intellectual origins are cloudy, but they lie in a refinement of ‘sacred’ histories, especially those of Judaism and Christianity. The first major philosopher to outline a scheme of world history was Immanuel Kant in The Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784), and German Idealism also produced Hegel’sLectures on the Philosophy of World History (1837), a much longer and more ambitious attempt to make philosophical sense of the history of the world as a whole. According to Hegel, history is rational, the working out, in fact, of philosophical understanding itself.

The accelerating success of natural science in the nineteenth century gave rise to a powerful combination of empiricism and logical positivism which produced a philosophical climate highly unfavourable to Hegelian philosophy of history. The belief became widespread among philosophers that Hegel, and Marx after him, had developed a priori theories that ignored historical contingency in favour of historical necessity, and which were empirically unfalsifiable. Karl Popper’s philosophy of science was especially influential in converting philosophy of history to a new concern with the methods of historical study rather than with the shape of the past. Two rival conceptions of historical method existed. One tried to model explanation in history on what they took to be the form of explanation in science, and argued for the existence of ‘covering laws’ by which historians connect the events they seek to explain. The other argued for a distinctive form of explanation in history, whose object was the meaning of human action and whose structure was narrative rather than deductive.

Neither side in this debate was able to claim a convincing victory, with the result that philosophers gradually lost interest in history and began to concern themselves more generally with the nature of human action. This interest, combined with a revival of nineteenth-century German hermeneutics, the study of texts in their social and cultural milieu, in turn revived interest among analytical philosophers in the writings of Hegel and Nietzsche. The impact of continental influences in philosophy, art criticism and social theory was considerable, and reintroduced a historical dimension that had been largely absent from twentieth-century analytical philosophy. In particular, the formation of fundamental philosophical ideas began to be studied as a historical process. The Enlightenment came to be seen as a crucial period in the development of philosophy, and of modernity more generally, and with this understanding came the belief that the contemporary Western world is postmodern. In this way, social theory and the philosophy of culture in fact returned, albeit unawares, to the ‘grand narrative’ tradition in philosophy of history.
Social sciences, prediction in
Authors: Lagerspetz Eerik
Published: September 2018

Prediction is important in science for two reasons. First human beings have a practical interest in knowing the future. Therefore, all science is potentially predictive in the sense that its results may be used as a basis for expectations. Second, a test of our beliefs is the truth of the predictions we can derive from them. In the social sciences, however, predictions are often supposed to create specific philosophical and methodological problems, the roots of which are the following: the phenomena studied in the social sciences are so complex and so interrelated that it is practically impossible to formulate law-like generalizations about them; human beings are supposed to possess free will; and the predictions may themselves modify the phenomena predicted.
Psychology, theories of
Authors: Wetherick N.E.
Published: September 2018

The object of study in psychology is the experience and behaviour of organisms, particularly human organisms. Psychology resembles the other sciences in employing methods appropriate to material phenomena but, unlike them, the mind (sometimes held to be immaterial) is among its objects of study. If the mind were immaterial it is difficult to see how psychology could proceed. Psychology differs from the other sciences in that understanding may not permit prediction and/or control of the phenomena. This is a consequence of the fact that human organisms may become aware of causal factors that would otherwise have determined their experience or behaviour. Being aware, they have a choice. (This is not, of course, to deny that the choice may itself be determined by more remote factors.)

In the seventeenth century, Descartes proposed that the mind (or soul), though immaterial, was nevertheless capable of two-way causal interaction with the material body. It is often held that what is immaterial cannot interact with what is material but Descartes’ proposal was, in its context, so valuable that it has ever since exercised a profound influence on philosophy and on what most of us take for granted (for example, the unexamined belief that the mind/soul is, in some sense, immaterial but does, in some sense, interact with the body).

The possibility of scientific psychology was preserved by Leibniz’s hypothesis of psycho-physical parallelism (according to which the deity keeps mind and body running in parallel, though there is no causal interaction between them). This view did not survive the passing of an era of universal (and largely unquestioned) religious belief. At the beginning of the twentieth century behaviourism tried to do without mind, it also tried to avoid surreptitious appeal to the lay person’s unexamined ‘mind’ concept. In the 1960s, the cognitive revolution in psychology substantially broadened the range of phenomena under investigation but at the cost of allowing appeals to an unexamined ‘mind of last resort’.

The headlong advance of the computer, which has taken over many functions previously reserved to members of the human species, leaves open the question whether it will, one day, take over all of them – or will be permitted to do so.
Race, theories of
Authors: Banton Michael
Published: September 2018

The first theories of race were attempts to explain why the peoples of Europe (or sometimes particular peoples within Europe) had developed a higher civilization than the peoples of other regions. They attributed inequality in development to different biological inheritance, undervaluing the importance of the learning process. Between the world wars social scientists demonstrated how many apparently natural differences, and attitudes towards other groups, were not inherited but learned behaviour. They asked instead why people should entertain false ideas about members of other groups. As the twentieth century comes to an end, it is claimed on the one hand that processes of racial group formation can be explained in the same terms as those used for explaining group phenomena in general. On the other hand it is maintained that the only possible theories are those explaining why, in particular societies and at particular times, racism assumes a given form.
Scientific realism and social science
Authors: Keat Russell
Published: September 2018

A central issue in the philosophy of the social sciences is the possibility of naturalism: whether disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, economics and psychology can be ‘scientific’ in broadly the same sense in which this term is applied to physics, chemistry, biology and so on. In the long history of debates about this issue, both naturalists and anti-naturalists have tended to accept a particular view of the natural sciences – the ‘positivist’ conception of science. But the challenges to this previously dominant position in the philosophy of science from around the 1960s made this shared assumption increasingly problematic. It was no longer clear what would be implied by the naturalist requirement that the social sciences should be modelled on the natural sciences. It also became necessary to reconsider the arguments previously employed by anti-naturalists, to see whether these held only on the assumption of a positivist conception of science. If so, a non-positivist naturalism might be defended: a methodological unity of the social and natural sciences based on some alternative to positivism. That this is possible has been argued by scientific realists in the social sciences, drawing on a particular alternative to positivism: the realist conception of science developed in the 1970s by Harré and others.
Social choice
Authors: Hamlin Alan
Published: September 2018

Social choice theory is the branch of economics concerned with the relationships between individual values, preferences and rights and collective decision making and evaluation. Social choice theory therefore provides connections between the formal analysis of rational choice, the debate on political process, and ethics. A central theme in social choice theory has been the aggregation of individual preferences into either a social decision rule or a social evaluation rule. The most famous result in social choice theory – Arrow’s impossibility theorem – is that such aggregation is impossible if individual preferences are conceived as ordinal in nature, and if the aggregation procedure is to satisfy certain apparently reasonable conditions. This result implies that neither a voting system nor a system of moral evaluation can be found that satisfies all of the required conditions. Further impossibility theorems arise from attempts to model the role of individual rights.

Much of social choice theory is concerned with interpreting, extending and questioning these impossibility theorems in a variety of contexts. This discussion has generated an extensive interchange at the margins of economics and ethics on topics such as the commensurability of values and the relationship between morality and rationality.
Social laws
Authors: Pettit Philip
Published: September 2018

Social science has always aspired to be like natural science (Hawthorn 1976). And since natural science claims to discover laws of nature, social science has always claimed to discover laws of society. There are two important problems raised by such social laws. What makes the laws social in the appropriate sense? And if they really obtain, does that mean that human beings are not as autonomous as one might have thought: that we are pawns in a game that the laws control?