If the decades of the forties through the sixties were dominated by discussion of Hempel's “covering law“ explication of explanation (and its variants), that of the seventies was preoccupied with Salmon's “statistical relevance” conception, which emerged as the principal alternative to Hempel's enormously influential account. Readers of Wesley C. Salmon's Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World (Salmon 1984), therefore, ought to find it refreshing to discover that its author has not remained content with a facile defense of his previous investigations; on the contrary, Salmon offers an original account of different kinds of explications, advances additional criticisms of various alternative theories, and elaborates a novel “two-tiered“ analysis of explanation that tacitly depends upon a “two-tiered” account of homogeneity. Indeed, if the considerations that follow are correct, Salmon has not merely refined his statistical relevance account but has actually abandoned it in favor of a “causal/mechanistic“ construction. This striking development suggests that the theory of explanation is likely to remain as lively an arena of debate in the eighties as it has been in the past.

The compatibility of the Gaia hypothesis with Darwinism is often challenged on the grounds that (1) to be potent, natural selection requires the existence of a population (whereas Gaia is a single entity), and (2) natural selection requires the entities forming a population to reproduce (whereas Gaia merely persists). However, using the Price equation, I argue, following others, that the Gaia hypothesis can fit squarely within a Darwinian framework because Gaia can exhibit adaptations if a process at a lower level (e.g., an ecosystem) can occur, and the notion of natural selection can be extended to accommodate evolution without reproduction.

The issue of materialism has recently been raised again. Mr. Putnam argues against philosophical behaviorism [4]. Such a position holds, as he construes it, that statements like ‘Jones is angry’ can be analyzed in solely behavioral terms. When one argues against philosophical behaviorism, he might be expected to distinguish this metaphysical position from behavior science. Putnam, however, does not make the distinction. Consequently he argues against both. I shall first state the distinction between these two different things, namely, philosophical behaviorism and behavior science, as I see it. The behavior scientist adopts the thesis that in principle it is possible to predict future behavior on the basis of data concerning environmental, behavioral, and physiological variables. All three of these he considers in physical terms. The behavior scientist thus speaks about physical objects and properties of such. Talking in such terms, he believes that it is in principle possible to coordinate to statements asserting that person X has or is in state of mind Y another statement, employing only the above mentioned physical terms, such that either both are true or both are false. The reasons for the behavior scientist's program are the well known quandaries involved in the observation of other people's minds and the need for intersubjective verification in science. One can further distinguish between a narrower and a broader view of behavior science. The former restricts itself to environmental and behavioral variables at what some call the macro level; the latter includes, or even concentrates upon, physiological variables. As scientists neither the behaviorist nor the physiologist asks or answers philosophical questions, either epistemological or ontological, about minds, bodies, and mental contents.

Wesley Salmon defends an ontic realism that distinguishes explanatory from descriptive knowledge. Explanatory knowledge makes appeals to (unobservable) theoretical acausal mechanisms. Salmon presents an argument designed both to legitimize attributing truth values to theoretical claims and to justify treating theoretical claims as descriptions. The argument succeeds but only at the price of calling the distinction between explanation and description into question. Even if Salmon’s attempts to distinguish causal mechanisms from other mechanisms are successful, the assumed centrality of the appeal to such mechanisms in providing scientific explanations is left open by Salmon’s account.

Stephen Stich has argued that psychological theories that instantiate his Syntactic Theory of Mind are to be preferred to content-based or representationalist theories, because the former can capture and explain a wider range of generalizations about cognitive processes than the latter. Stich's claims about the relative merits of the Syntactic Theory of Mind are unfounded. Not only is it false that syntactic theories can capture psychological generalizations that content-based theories cannot, but a large class of behavioral regularities, readily explained by content-based theories, appear to be beyond their explanatory reach.

Aristotle's rule of proportions of the factors of motion, presented in VII 5 of the Physics, characterizes Aristotelian force. Observing that the locomotion to which Aristotle applied the Rule is the motion produced by manual labor, I develop an interpretation of the factors of motion that reveals that Aristotelian force is Newtonian power. An alternate interpretation of the Rule by Toulmin and Goodfield implicitly identifies Aristotelian force with Newtonian force. In order to account for the absence of an acceleration in the rate of forced motion, they incorporate into the Rule the medium's resistance to motion due to viscosity as an additional factor. The resulting interpretations of the original factors of motion lose the exactness the power interpretation grants them. The constant rate of forced motion follows immediately from the power interpretation. It is also compatible with the Rule's description of the motion that is produced by the sum of forces.

Recently, Lisa Feldman Barrett and colleagues have introduced the Theory of Constructed Emotions (TCE), in which emotions are constituted by a process of categorizing the self as being in an emotional state. The view, however, has several counterintuitive implications: for instance, a person can have multiple distinct emotions at once. Further, the TCE concludes that emotions are constitutively social phenomena. In this article, I explicate the TCE*, which, while substantially similar to the TCE, makes several distinct claims aimed at avoiding the counterintuitive implications plaguing the TCE. Further, because of the changes that comprise the TCE*, emotions are not constitutively social phenomena.

This article develops an axiomatic theory of induction that speaks to the recent debate on Bayesian orgulity. It shows the exact principles associated with the belief that data can corroborate universal laws. We identify two types of disbelief about induction: skepticism that the existence of universal laws of nature can be determined empirically, and skepticism that the true law of nature, if it exists, can be successfully identified. We formalize and characterize these two dispositions toward induction by introducing novel axioms for subjective probabilities. We also relate these dispositions to the (controversial) axiom of σ-additivity.

The basic problem of perceptual change is how to account for both variation and constancy in perceiving the world. Is order learned? How deep does plasticity go in that respect? I argue that different kinds of perceptual plasticity have been confused in recent debates, notably between J. Fodor and P. M. Churchland. By focusing on changes in the use of concepts, the issues in the Fodor-Churchland debate can be resolved. Beyond that debate, I propose a generalized encoding approach to perception as a way of accounting for a significant form of perceptual change.

Since the seventeenth century, when Descartes divided the universe into two realms, the distinctive character of one of which being its spatiality or extendedness, philosophers have been increasingly concerned with the analysis of the category of Space. Scientists, too, have been interested in the concepts of Space and Time, especially since the promulgation of the theory of relativity.

Carnap's system of inductive logic (1) has very often been criticized on the ground that “degree of confirmation” is defined only for languages which are extremely over-simplified. Allegedly, it would be very difficult—and perhaps impossible—to define it adequately for languages formalized within the higher predicate calculi, or languages equivalent to these in richness, and it is such languages that would be needed were we ever to formalize the language of empirical science as a whole. Thus, this criticism bears not only on Carnap's work, but on all attempts to construct an exact analysis of induction from this particular standpoint; that is, from the standpoint of “logical measure functions.”

Relationist theories of space or space-time based on embedding of a physical relational system A into a corresponding geometrical system B raise problems associated with the degree of uniqueness of the embedding. Such uniqueness problems are familiar in the representational theory of measurement (RTM), and are dealt with by imposing a condition of uniqueness of embeddings up to composition with an “admissible transformation” of the space B. Friedman (1983) presents an alternative treatment of the uniqueness problem for embedding relationist theories, developed independently of RTM. Friedman's approach differs from that of RTM in securing uniqueness by adding new primitives to the physical system A in contrast to the RTM approach which adds new axioms. Friedman's proposal has recently been developed and defended by Catton and Solomon (1988).

This method of solving the uniqueness problem is here argued to be substantially inferior to the RTM method, both in practice and in principle. In practice we find that in none of the concrete examples offered to illustrate the method is the uniqueness problem actually solved in general. Moreover we find that in the most interesting case (addition to the system A of a finite number of relations of finite degree) the method is in principle incapable of success for mathematical reasons. In addition to these technical difficulties there are compelling methodological reasons for preferring the RTM method to the method of adding primitives.

Only one philosopher has succeeded in building his reputation on silence—Cratylus. It is said that under no circumstance would he say anything, but would merely crook his finger. Nor is it known whether he achieved this unique glory by a persistence that lasted from toothless youth to toothless old age, or whether he merely petered out into withering speechlessness before the follies of man and the grandeur of God. More likely it was something like the latter, for otherwise we would be confronted by the delicate riddle: why was he called a philosopher?

Nevertheless, a tenable explanation is that Cratylus' reputation was arrived at by an experiment. Arranging philosophers on a scale of self .control in speech, one might derive the plausible law: the less one says the more he is of a philosopher. Ergo, say nothing and be declared the worthiest of philosophers. The difficulties in such an extrapolation, however, are very great. It is hard to see what harm just one word can do, and even two or three, or several, if they but fall short of being a sentence. Why absolute silence? Then, again, what harm is there in repeating even a multitude of words, the entire dictionary if you please, plus whatever sounds you can think of, provided you say nothing? And since we have progressed so far with the argument, what harm can there be even in connected speech, grammatical, fluent and mellifluous, provided you still say nothing? Cratylus, apparently, was playing a safe bet with a vengeance. He must have feared being understood (or misunderstood) by accident!

A physical theory intends to provide us with a picture of a certain domain of physical phenomena. We have become accustomed to deal rather with physical pictures than with phenomena themselves. This is indispensable, even if the number of phenomena contained in the picture is so large that we cannot have them in mind all at the same time or if the phenomena are not directly accessible to our senses and cannot be studied without the help of a set of very complicated apparatus.

There is danger in stressing commonalities among methods because the differences matter in fixing the meaning of our claims. Different methods can, and often do, test the same claim. But it takes a strong network of theory and empirical results to ensure that. Failing that, we are likely to fall into inference by pun. We use one set of methods to establish a claim and then draw inferences licensed by a similar-sounding claim that calls for different methods of testing. Our inferences fail, and bridges we build (or policies we set) depending on them fall down.

This paper does not purport to present a fully developed argument. Rather, it intends to delineate, in broad strokes and in a synoptic manner, the total frame of reference of Scientific Empiricism as far as it is necessary for an integration of the several contributory clarifications of the complex, usually referred to as the psychophysical problem. Several considerations seem to justify such an attempt. It is desirable, from time to time, to free the results of logical and methodological analysis from their specialized contexts. Only thus can they be presented in a way which brings to the fore their continuity with more traditionally worded epistemological thought. By doing this such a presentation should also help to dissolve the current objections of formalism, scientism, and philosophical irrelevance so frequently based on misunderstanding. It is only fair to admit, however, that these misunderstandings have been facilitated by the preoccupation with the technical, and the brevity with regard to the nontechnical, which characterize the modern analysts.

Russell's book on Leibniz appeared in 1900. That it is important, because of its subject and because of its author, hardly needs to be argued. An examination of it, or of parts of it, after more than half a century is therefore in order. Yet the title I chose indicates only part of my intent. The other part is to examine certain ideas, irrespective of what either Leibniz or Russell thought and of what the latter thought about the thoughts of the former. The title best suited to this part is Individuals, Natures, Relations, and Change. The mixed form of presentation, analytic and quasihistorical, has very great advantages. For the nature of the philosophical enterprise is such that an analyst is lost without some grasp or, at least, some image of “structural history.” The danger is that only very few, if any, are masters of two trades; in this case, logical analysis and historical scholarship. I, for one, make no pretense whatsoever of being a scholar. Naturally, I have read in Leibniz; and I did not skip or take lightly anything in the letters to Arnauld and Clarke; but I have by far not read everything that is available. Reading about Leibniz, aside from Russell, of which I did but little, I found Latta and, particularly, Joseph sometimes helpful. More often, though, I felt that the former's Hegelianism and the latter's Aristotelianism had got between them and their subject.