In these days of Gestalttheorie it seems not untimely to inquire whether psychology itself does not stand in need of being recognized as a configuration of complementary parts. The suggestion, it is true, tends at the first to be repudiated by the implacability of the schools with their claims and counterclaims resounding on every side. On further analysis, however, such controversy seems to acquire the very different significance of having permitted certain partial aspects of the whole field to become well-articulated, even if in somewhat exaggerated form. In other words, if there is any underlying unity in psychology, then the very overstatements of the school zealots while unwittingly defeating their own purpose may have been doing the science a real service by throwing its basic pattern into bold relief. In broadest terms this seems to describe what has been happening in psychology in the recent past and to define the present stage of its development.

The intuitive notion of a statistical explanation has been explicated in different ways; recently it has even been claimed that there are no statistical explanations at all. In an attempt to clarify the disputed issue, the approaches adopted by Hempel, by Jeffrey, Salmon and Greeno, and by Stegmüller are analyzed critically, as far as they are concerned with the explanation of particular events. A solution of the controversy is proposed on the basis of a concept of explanation which refers essentially to a causal analysis of the explanandum. The possibility of statistical explanations, then, becomes contingent upon the existence of indeterministic causation. In conclusion, therefore, a conception of causality is sketched which shows that indeterminism and causal connection are compatible, at least from an epistemological point of view, so that statistical explanation can be seen to represent a specific and possibly irreducible scientific activity.

According to Hugh Mellor in Real Time II (1998, Ch. 12), assuming the logical independence of causal facts and the ‘law of large numbers’, causal loops are impossible because if they were possible they would produce inconsistent sets of frequencies. I clarify the argument, and argue that it would be preferable to abandon the relevant independence assumption in the case of causal loops.

I argue here that critics of biological explanations of human nature are mistaken when they maintain that the truth of genetic determinism implies the end of critical evaluation and reform of our social institutions. Such a claim erroneously presupposes that our social values, practices, and institutions have nothing to do with what makes biological explanations troublesome. What constitutes a problem for those who are concerned with social justice is not the fact that particular behaviors might be genetically determined, but the fact that our value system and social institutions create the conditions that make such behaviors problematic.

Much philosophical attention has been devoted to whether economic models explain and more generally to how scientific models represent. Yet there is an issue more practically important to economics than either of these, which I label the efficiency question: regardless of how exactly models represent, or of whether their role is explanatory or something else, is current modeling practice an efficient way to achieve these goals or should research efforts be redirected? In addition to showing how the efficiency question has been relatively neglected, I give two examples of the kind of analysis it requires.

In a recent paper, Pettigrew (2022) reports a generalization of the celebrated accuracy-dominance theorem due to Predd et al. (2009), but Pettigrew’s proof is incorrect. I will explain the mistakes and provide a correct proof.

Transdisciplinary research knits together knowledge from diverse epistemic communities in addressing social-environmental challenges, such as biodiversity loss, climate crises, food insecurity, and public health. This article reflects on the roles of philosophy of science in transdisciplinary research while focusing on Indigenous and other subjugated forms of knowledge. We offer a critical assessment of demarcationist approaches in philosophy of science and outline a constructive alternative of transdisciplinary philosophy of science. While a focus on demarcation obscures the complex relations between epistemic communities, transdisciplinary philosophy of science provides resources for meeting epistemic and political challenges of collaborative knowledge production.

Philosophers sometimes claim that economics, and the idealizing strategies it employs, is ultimately unable to provide genuine laws of nature. Therefore, unlike physics, it does not qualify as an actual science. Careful consideration of thermodynamics, a well-developed physical theory, reveals substantial parallels with economic methodology. The corrective account of scientific understanding I offer appreciates these parallels: understanding in terms of efficient performance.

It has been argued repeatedly that the modern study of social and cultural evolution took its inspiration and form from Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and Descent of Man. In 1920, Robert H. Lowie (27; pp. 55–56) observed that it was after evolutionary principles had been accepted in biology that they were applied to social phenomena, and that Lewis Henry Morgan was among the first to make the application. Sir James George Frazer (16; p. 581), at about the same time, dated the birth of anthropology from the promulgation of the evolution theory of Darwin and Wallace in 1859 and maintained that “this conception of evolution … supplies a basis for the modern science of anthropology.” Harry Elmer Barnes (1; pp. 25–26) similarly traced the development of anthropology from the theory of organic evolution and advised the student that he “need not concern himself with the history of method in sociology before the entry of Darwinian concepts.”

In a small handful of papers in theoretical population genetics, John Gillespie (2000a, 2000b, 2001) argues that a new stochastic process he calls “genetic draft” is evolutionarily more significant than genetic drift. This case study of chance in evolution explores Gillespie's proposed stochastic evolutionary force and sketches the implications of Gillespie's argument for philosophers’ explorations of genetic drift.

Much of the criticism of Stevens's criterion for permissible statistics as applied to measurement data results from a lack of clarity in Stevens's position. In this paper set-theoretical notions have been used to clarify that position. We define a sig-function as a function defined on numerical assignments. If u and ℜ are empirical and numerical relational systems, respectively, then a sig-function F is constant on u with respect to ℜ if, and only if, the value of F is the same for all numerical assignments for u with respect to ℜ. Using these notions we prove rigorously certain generalizations of Stevens's results.

Examination of attempts at theory reduction (S to T) shows that a process of cognitive emergence is involved in which concepts of S, Cs, emerge from T. This permits the ‘bridge laws’ to be stated. These are not in conflict with incommensurability of the Cs with the CT. Cognitive emergence may occur asymptotically or because of similarities of mathematical expressions; it is not necessarily holistic. Mereologically and nonmereologically related theory pairs are considered. Examples are chosen from physics. An important distinction is made between ‘theory reduction’ and ‘reductive explanation’.

I argue against Matthew Slater’s rejection of what he calls the grounding claim in his stable property cluster (SPC) account of natural kinds. This claim states that the epistemic value of natural kinds depends on the existence of some ground to bind together a kind’s properties. Using two test cases from academic medicine, I show that grounds are genuinely explanatory of scientific epistemic practices and that the SPC account should not do without them in its philosophical analysis of natural kinds.

Professor Massey's exposition and analysis [5] of Professor Grünbaum's writings on metric aspects of space seem to me both very helpful in understanding those writings and to contain a considerable original contribution to the subject. Nevertheless I would like to argue that there is an alternative to Massey's explication which seems to me more faithful to Grünbaum's remarks; it seems at least to have the virtue of not forcing Grünbaum to reject the usual mathematical definitions of the notions used.

The creation-of-matter hypothesis of the Bondi-Gold-Hoyle steady-state cosmology requires that in an infinite time to which the first transfinite number may be assigned the number of atoms of matter produced would be equal to the cardinal number of the set of mathematical points in the continuum. The existence of a set of finite atoms with that cardinal number is physically unacceptable. The argument for the production of a non-denumerable set of atoms, in infinite time, is given in terms of a model which is shown to be isomorphic with the original Cantor “diagonal” proof for the existence of a non-denumerable infinity. An alternative model which meets the requirements of the steady-state theory is presented; in this model, the number of atoms is explicitly no greater than countably infinite, and remains countably infinite as long as the past time of the universe is restricted to the unlimited set of finite unit-time intervals. If the origin of the steady-state universe is taken as being within that infinite set, expressed by the negative natural numbers, the contradiction of an atom at every mathematical point does not arise. The contradiction does arise if the origin is not within the set of finite numbers, and accordingly there is a restriction as to which concept of infinite past may properly be maintained in the steady-state theory.

The Fitzgerald–Lorentz contraction hypothesis, proposed as an explanation of the Michelson–Morley result, fails to account for the Kennedy–Thorndike result. Hence, Grünbaum argues, the hypothesis has been falsified.

However, the contraction hypothesis as formulated by Lorentz is false for the very fundamental reason that it entails a contradiction, namely, the consequence that light waves must have a variable velocity along what by definition is taken to be a rest length. Furthermore, the attempt to resolve this contradiction by coupling the Fitzgerald–Lorentz contraction with the hypothesis that clock rates are a function of velocity, is open to a sound, methodological objection. The Michelson–Morley result is fully satisfied, provided only that the lengths of the interferometer arms, in the longitudinal and transverse positions, are thought to be related to one another in a certain ratio, and this ratio may be interpreted as a contraction in both arms. Since this twofold contraction hypothesis suffices to explain both the Michelson–Morley and the Kennedy–Thorndike results, and since it entails no contradiction, there is no need to correct both the length of rods and the rate of clocks. Therefore, the combined clock-rod hypothesis, and with it the Fitzgerald–Lorentz contraction hypothesis, must be rejected.

Gravitational interactions allowed astronomers to conclude that dark matter rings all luminous galaxies in gigantic halos, but this only accounts for a fraction of the total mass of dark matter believed to exist. Where is the rest? We hypothesize that some of it resides in dark galaxies, pure dark matter halos that either never possessed or have totally lost their baryonic matter. This article explores methodological challenges that arise because of the nature of observation in astrophysics and examines how the blend of observation, simulation, and theory we call the Observing the Invisible approach might make detecting such dark objects possible.

It is claimed that unacceptable constraints on initial data are imposed by certain responses to paradoxes that threaten time travel, closed timelike curves (CTCs) and other backwards causation hypotheses. In this paper I argue against the following claims: to say “contradictions are impossible so something must prevent the paradox” commits in general to constraints on initial data, that for fixed point dynamics so-called grey state solutions explain why contradictions do not arise, and the latter have been proved to avoid constraints on initial data.