It is commonly thought that the dispositional view of purposiveness is itself incompatible with the programmatic claims of neurophysiologists. In this paper, various versions of four arguments for this incompatibility are examined, and rejected as unsound. Central to the argument is a rough sketch of a “mechanistic” position which seems clearly compatible with a dispositional view of purposiveness.

It is quite common in our texts and periodicals to run across formulations of the learning process in which the word acquire is used in some way as part of the description. Individuals are said to “acquire” habits or skills or languages or attitudes or solutions or emotions. The organism is said to “acquire” certain of its traits from the environment (sometimes through experience, sometimes not) and even to “acquire” from heredity. Such usage is not technically incorrect. Webster defines acquire as follows:

Often scholars who call themselves social scientists have not meant by the term science the sort of activity which has generally concerned those calling themselves natural scientists. In the latter sense very little of what has been called “social science” can also be called scientific. The term “social science” as used here refers primarily to the studies which have gone under such titles as Politics (or Government, or Political Science), Sociology, Anthropology, Social and Clinical Psychology, and Economics. To some degree much of what will here be said does not apply with equal justice to the field of Economics. It has a more highly developed system of general abstractions and considerably more precise techniques of analysis than have generally characterized the other social sciences. The difference, however, is one of degree not kind. Many of the difficulties mentioned below certainly plague the field of Economics as well as the others.

Any physical theory which seriously proposes that events in the future may be the efficient causes of events in the past certainly may be regarded—at least at first glance—as a rather revolutionary doctrine. In a recent issue of the Reviews of Modern Physics (Vol. 17, Nos. 2 & 3, p. 157) commemorating Niels Bohr's sixtieth birthday, and under the editorship of the latest Nobel Prize winner in physics, W. Pauli, there appeared such a theory—written by Bohr's former student, J. A. Wheeler and Wheeler's associate (and former student) at Princeton, R. P. Feynman. The title of their paper appears harmless enough: “Interaction with the Absorber as the Mechanism of Radiation.” It is one part of a more comprehensive three-part paper intended for later publication as a general constructive critique of classical field theory (Maxwell's electrodynamics) and of the theory of action at a distance as propounded by Schwarzschild and Fokker. (In passing, we note that in this more general paper there is derived the Frenkel solution of the old problem of infinite self-energy of the point-charge electron.)

It is the purpose of this paper to review the present status of discussion concerning the concept of probability. The exposition will consist of six sections: (1) A brief statement of the most important traditional views of the concept of probability: subjective and objective; (a) A brief criticism of two traditionally important conceptions: a priori probability and the Principle of Indifference; (3) A criticism of an outstanding example of the subjective theory of probability, the theory of F. P. Ramsey; (4) A criticism of the most widely known of the objective logical theories of probability, the theory of J. M. Keynes; (5) Some remarks concerning the results of the recent work of Reichenbach and von Mises with particular reference to clarification of the concept of probability; (6) A summary of the case for the frequency interpretation of probability, revealing its basic importance in the light of present evidence.

Some authors (Muller and Saunders, Huggett and Norton) have attempted to defend Leibniz’s Identity of Indiscernibles through weak discernibility. The idea is that if there is a symmetric, nonreflexive physical relation that holds between two particles, then those particles cannot be identical. In this article I focus only on Muller and Saunders’s account and argue that the means by which they achieve weak discernibility is not through a quantum mechanical observable but an alternate mathematical construction that is both unorthodox and incomplete.

It has been suggested that particle physics has reached the “dawn of the post-naturalness era.” I explain the current shift in particle physicists’ attitude toward naturalness. I argue that the naturalness principle was perceived to be supported by theories it has inspired. The potential coherence between major beyond the standard model (BSM) proposals and the naturalness principle led to an increasing degree of credibility of the principle among particle physicists. The absence of new physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has undermined the potential coherence and has led to the principle’s loss of significance.

According to Skow, correct answers to why questions cite only causes or grounds, but not nonaccidental regularities. Accounts that cite nonaccidental regularities typically confuse second-level reasons with first-level reasons. Only causes and grounds are first-level reasons why. Nonaccidental regularities are second-level reasons why. I first show that Skow’s arguments for the accusation of confusion depend on the independent thesis that only citations of first-level reasons why are (parts of) answers to why questions. Then I argue that this thesis is false. Consequently, the claim that correct answers to why questions cite only causes or grounds is refuted as well.

Among advocates and critics of the “extended evolutionary synthesis” (EES), “reciprocal causation” refers to the view that adaptive evolution is a bidirectional phenomenon, whereby organisms and environments impinge on each other through processes of niche construction and natural selection. I argue that reciprocal causation is incompatible with the view that natural selection is a metaphysically emergent causal process. The emergent character of selection places reciprocal causation on the horns of dilemma, and neither horn can rescue it. I conclude that proponents of the EES must abandon the claim that the process of natural selection features in cycles of reciprocal causation.

Merging of opinions results underwrite Bayesian rejoinders to complaints about the subjective nature of personal probability. Such results establish that sufficiently similar priors achieve consensus in the long run when fed the same increasing stream of evidence. Here, we establish a merging result for sets of probability measures updated by Jeffrey conditioning. This generalizes a number of different merging results in the literature. We also show that such sets converge to a shared, maximally informed opinion. Finally, we demonstrate the philosophical significance of our study by detailing applications to the topics of dynamic coherence, imprecise probabilities, and opinion pooling.

To be scientific is to be objective. This is a sine qua non in the social scientists’ efforts to keep their researches on a par with those of the natural scientists. The extreme differences of subject matter in the two fields, however, make it difficult to maintain an even standard of objectivity. Whether objectivity is defined in the strict Cartesian sense or in a broader sense also makes a difference. The Cartesian meaning threatens to enslave the social sciences to Physics as the Lord of All Sciences, and this possibility is so familiar that it needs but brief comment. A broader interpretation of objectivity meets with complications which are only inadequately recognized as yet, and which may call for reinterpretation of the scope of science or else may open up new and independent avenues of opportunity beyond the limitations of science.

In a recent article Professor M. C. Nahm, defending what he characterizes as an amplified version of the James' theory of the emotions, argues that teleological principles are required in any adequate definition of the emotions. Mechanistic principles may account for the physiological basis of emotional experience, it is maintained, but if we are to define the total experience, which includes a certain conscious content, we must go beyond the mechanistic hypothesis and regard the emotions as directed toward certain ends. He proposes to reveal the “epistemological core” of the problem of the emotions with the evident intention of indicating the lines which the development of the theory of the emotions should follow. It is the aim of this paper to scrutinize the general problem of the emotions in the light of Mr. Nahm's arguments and to consider specifically: (1) the alleged teleological implications of the problem, (2) the statement of the problem of the emotions as it is given in Mr. Nahm's paper, and (3) the present state of research as it may be relevant to the question whether Mr. Nahm's presentation makes for philosophical clarity or methodological advancement in science.

From the desire to find support and confirmation for our personal sensory observations, and from the human interest in sharing our experiences with others, there emerges a basic principle of scientific method: We demand the possibility of intelligible communication and agreement concerning individuals' sensory perceptions in particular and their experiences in general. This requirement is made both for the natural and social sciences. The raw material offered for logical organization must be capable of exhibiting an inter-subjective character—such material, or protocols, must be acceptable in common to all concerned. And it must be acceptable for logical organization or systematization in some science.

One of the most persistent problems of marketing has been the question of what is meant by ‘marketing’. In the fifties and sixties discussion focused on the alleged scientific character of marketing. “Is marketing an art or a science?” was the principal question of the day [14], [5], [28]. This preoccupation with the procedures and the conceptual framework of marketing was followed by an eager interest in the contributions which clarification of marketing concepts could make to attaining the objectives of marketing managers. Managerial marketing and management science in marketing are the results of this identification of marketing with the objectives of its managerial users [16], [25]. More recently the emphasis has switched from procedures, conceptual framework, and objectives to the problem of the proper boundaries of marketing [19], [23], [18].

The “determination to catch the world's multiplicity and variety in a single net appears to be an incurable bias of the learned mind.” The extremes to which a philosopher will go to make his net hold water should be nothing short of absurd to the literal minded who neglect “the climate of opinion” which shapes the very logic of the systems or who fail to sympathize with the deep underlying human needs which call forth the great philosophies. Most thinkers in this anthropological day make their bow to the fact of cultural conditioning and to the fact of personal and social surds in the thought of the past. We make our bow, and then proceed to forget that we are human individuals living in an historical period with its own unique strains and symphonies and discords: if only today's system can be shown to be scientific, it must then be beyond dispute.

There seem to be some very good reasons for a philosopher of science to be a deductivist about scientific reasoning. Deductivism is apparently connected with a demand for clarity and definiteness in the reconstruction of scientists' reasonings. And some philosophers even think that deductivism is the way around the problem of induction. But the deductivist image is challenged by cases of actual scientific reasoning, in which hard-to-state and thus discursively ill-defined elements of thought nonetheless significantly condition what practitioners accept as cogent argument. And arguably, these problem cases abound. For example, even geometry—for most of its history—was such a problem case, despite its exactness and rigor. It took a tremendous effort on the part of Hilbert and others, to make geometry fit the deductivist image. Looking to the empirical sciences, the problems seem worse. Even the most exact and rigorous of empirical sciences—mechanics—is still the kind of problem case which geometry once was. In order for the deductivist image to fit mechanics, Hilbert's sixth problem (for mechanics) would need to be solved. This is a difficult, and perhaps ultimately impossible task, in which the success so far achieved is very limited. I shall explore some consequences of this for realism as well as for deductivism. Through discussing links between non-monotonicity, skills, meaning, globality in cognition, models, scientific understanding, and the ideal of rational unification, I argue that deductivists can defend their image of scientific reasoning only by trivializing it, and that for the adequate illumination of science, insights from anti-deductivism are needed as much as those which come from deductivism.

Thomas Polger and Lawrence Shapiro claim that unlike human-made artifacts cases of multiple realization in naturally occurring systems are uncommon. Drawing on cases from systems biology, I argue that multiple realization in naturally occurring systems is not as uncommon as Polger and Shapiro initially thought. The relevant cases, which I draw from systems biology, involve generalizable design principles called network motifs, which recur in different organisms and species and perform specific functions. I show that network motifs with entirely different underlying causal structures can perform the same function of interest. The article also considers the scope problem of multiple realization.

The following statement from James’ 1884 essay in Mind (12) is repeated in his later work (10, pp. 100–101) and appears often in secondary sources as a summary of his celebrated theory of the emotions:

Generalized Darwinism models cultural development as an evolutionary process, where traits evolve through variation, selection, and inheritance. Inheritance describes either a discrete unit’s transmission or a mixing of traits (i.e., blending inheritance). In this article, we compare classical models of cultural evolution and generalized population dynamics with respect to blending inheritance. We identify problems of these models and introduce our model, which combines relevant features of both. Blending is implemented as success-based social learning, which can be shown to be an optimal strategy.