The paper examines critically some recently published views by Ramsey on the contrast between ab initio and parametrized theories. I argue that, all things being equal, ab initio calculations are indeed regarded more highly in the physics and chemistry communities. A case study on density functional approaches in theoretical chemistry is presented in order to re-examine the question of ab initio and parametrized approaches in a contemporary context.

“The age-long endeavour to find an intellectual basis for ethics is an enterprise of such importance, and of such difficulty, that any explorer of that country must always be glad to hear the voices of his fellow-travellers. ‘This,’ Wittgenstein once said to me, ‘is a terrible business—just terrible! You can at best stammer when you talk of it.’”

With these words Waddington introduces his symposium Science and Ethics, a “communal, perhaps even co-operative stammering,” as he calls it. Also the present contribution to the “terrible business” cannot be more than a stammering; The business is so terrible today not only because of its inherent difficulties, but because of the tremendous odds which are at stake. When the Renaissance philosophers built the science of material nature they were fired by an enthusiasm of cosmic exploration. Today we are frozen in awe of a cosmic explosion. When Galileo pioneered his new science he knew that he was in the possession of the truth and that his opponents, steeped in error and superstition, would have to give way—eppur si muove! Today, building the science of ethics, we are neither equally sure nor equally confident. Our science is not yet formulated. Our opponents, though not right, may yet conquer before we have had time to develop the new science. We are not sure whether what was true for physics three hundred years ago is true for ethics today.

We often legitimately ascribe reality both to social and to natural kinds. But the bases for these ascriptions are not entirely the same. In both cases, reality is typically determined by what characterizations of causal factors are indispensable to adequate explanation. Nonetheless, a psychological role as part of an identity that instances embrace is sometimes, distinctively, a condition for ascribing reality to a social kind. Although such assessments of reality can be construed as employing a standard of causal activity shared with natural science, they reveal a distinctive moral dimension in the bases for ascribing reality to social kinds.

The question whether distant simultaneity (relativized to an inertial frame) has a factual or a conventional status in special relativity has long been disputed and remains in contention even today. At one point it appeared that Malament (1977) had settled the issue by proving that the only non-trivial equivalence relation definable from (temporally symmetric) causal connectability is the standard simultaneity relation. Recently, however, Sarkar and Stachel (1999) claim to have identified a suspect assumption in the proof by defining a non-standard simultaneity relation from causal connectability. I contend that their critique is based on a misunderstanding of the criteria for the definability of a relation, a misunderstanding that Malement's original treatment helped to foster. There are in fact a variety of notions of definability that can be brought to bear. They all, however, require a condition that suffices to secure Malament's result. The non-standard relation Sarkar and Stachel claim to be definable is not so definable, and, I argue, their proposal to modify the notion of “causal definability” is misguided. Finally, I address the relevance of Malament's result to the thesis of conventionalism.

This paper surveys some recent work on realization in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science.

After several decades during which formalization has flourished it now becomes possible to detect its shortcomings. A definition of formalization is given at the outset. It is next shown that the main justification of formalization as making explicit the form of a proof has serious difficulties. An important shortcoming is found in the fact that many validation procedures in logic and mathematics are not adequately represented deductively. Several such procedures relating to the validation of logical and mathematical sentences are examined. It is concluded that formalization is materially inadequate.

In this note a recently developed quantum oscillating finite space cosmological model is described. The principle novelty of the model is that there is a quantum blurring of the classical singularity between cycles, instead of a singularity free bounce. Recently, Quentin Smith (1988) has argued that present theoretical and observational evidence justifies the belief that the past history of the universe is finite. The relevance of this cosmological model to Smith's arguments is discussed.

Genetic regulatory networks are complex, involving tens or hundreds of genes and scores of proteins with varying dependencies and organizations. This invites the application of artificial techniques in coming to understand natural complexity. I describe two attempts to deploy artificial models in understanding natural complexity. The first abstracts from empirically established patterns, favoring random architectures and very general constraints, in an attempt to model developmental phenomena. The second incorporates detailed information concerning the genetic structure, organization, and dependencies in actual systems in an attempt to explain developmental differences. The results offered by these models, pitched at these different levels of abstraction, are different. The more detailed models are more continuous with classical developmental approaches.

This paper examines four arguments in support of Frege's theory of incomplete entities, the heart of his semantics and ontology. Two of these arguments are based upon Frege's contributions to the foundations of mathematics. These are shown to be question-begging. Two are based upon Frege's solution to the problem of the relation of language to thought and reality. They are metaphysical in nature and they force Frege to maintain a theory of types. The latter puts his theory of incomplete entities in the paradoxical position of maintaining that it is no theory at all. Moreover, his metaphysics rules out well-known suggestions for avoiding this difficulty.

A term and its contradictory exhaust the universe of discourse, but when examined for their relation to each other, I believe they are seen to exhaust that universe in a more particular respect than may have come into notice. They seem to exhaust or annul one of the leading notions of mathematical logic. This notion is the one concerning the whereabouts of the null class.

Twenty five hundred years ago a Greek named Thales introduced something important into the world. We know little about the details, but there is a persistent tradition going back at least as far as Aristotle that Thales is to be given the credit for being the first person to think in the way that led, without break in continuity, to the development of the scientific method of thought. The conclusions to which Thales came, if we can trust the tradition, are of no value today. The important thing was the way of putting and answering questions. This was carried on by Thales' followers until by the time of Plato and Aristotle the essentials of the scientific method were coming to be recognized even though they were not explicitly and adequately stated in abstraction.

The present paper examines the role of exact results in the theory of many-body physics, and specifically the example of the Mermin-Wagner theorem, a rigorous result concerning the absence of phase transitions in low-dimensional systems. While the theorem has been shown to hold for a wide range of many-body models, it is frequently ‘violated’ by results derived from the same models using numerical techniques. This raises the question of how scientists regulate their theoretical commitments in such cases, given that the models, too, are often described as approximations to the underlying ‘full’ many-body problem.

Owens (1993) argues that one cannot accept the anti-individualistic conclusions of arguments inspired by Twin Earth thought experiments and still maintain that folk psychological states causally explain behavior. Saidel (1994) has argued that Owens' argument illegitimately individuates the contents of folk psychological states widely and causal powers narrowly. He suggests that causal powers may well be wide, and that the conditions that militate in favor of wide content also militate in favor of wide causal powers; mutatis mutandis for narrow content and narrow causal powers. I argue that these suggestions are in error, and hence that Saidel's criticism is ineffective. Owens' original point is therefore likely to stand.

Most philosophical systems of ethics are based upon the reciprocity principle as expressed by the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you!” The same idea underlies Kant's categorical imperative: “Act always on such a maxim as thou canst at the same time will to be a universal law!” Here, the individual act is generalized into, and considered as the specific application of the general law of ethics.