In what follows our purpose is to make clear the reasons which lie back of Whitehead's appeal to eternal objects in his explanation of the emergence of actual entities and to show that so long as one operates within his scheme of ideas no other consistent explanation is available. A thoroughgoing reconstruction of the scheme is necessary if this presupposition is to be eliminated. If the project is successful, it will be demonstrated that the theory of actual entities provides no basis for the explanation of the emergence of novel things, which is one of the major tenets of the organic philosophy. The argument will develop by way of an analysis of the theory of “physical relatedness.”

Timothy Williamson claimed to prove with a coin-tossing example that hyperreal probabilities cannot save the principle of regularity. A premise of his argument is that two specified infinitary events must be assigned the same probability because, he claims, they are isomorphic. But as has been pointed out, they are not isomorphic. A way of framing Williamson’s argument that does not make it depend on the isomorphism claim is in terms of shifts in Bernoulli processes, the usual mathematical model of sequential coin tossing. But even so framed, the argument still fails.

The Unity of Science movement is directed primarily toward the further advancement of science, but a second phase is entered when the assessment of its significance for various aspects of civilization is undertaken. In this second phase would fall investigations of the utility of its resources in relation to educational problems.

1. Introduction. It is an amazing thing that, unlike pebbles, clouds and stars, the smallest building stones of Nature—the electrons, the protons and the neutrons—are all completely uniform. There seems to be a necessity in Nature for systems of a very special form, and one can wonder now what kind of necessity this is. I believe that this can only be a mathematical necessity, that consequently the principle of Nature is a mathematical one. How else could Nature obey the mathematical laws of physics if it were not because of her own principle? It can be argued that these mathematical laws, like Newtonian mechanics, the classical theory of electromagnetism and the quantum theory of the electron are all some form of beginner's luck, and that continued investigation will reveal Nature as more and more mysterious and irrational. If that were true, one might as well give up the pursuit of physics completely! But on one hand modern physics has discovered what we believe to be the elementary particles of the material world, and on the other hand it comes out that at least a part of these elementary forms obey mathematic laws to a very high degree of accuracy.

Charles Sanders Peirce, who contributed the term pragmatism to the language of philosophy, insisted always that the term was intended to designate a method. Pragmatism, he warned, is not a Weltanschauung, nor a doctrine of metaphysics, nor even an “attempt to determine any truth of things.” It is simply a method of ascertaining meanings, of making them clear, and of pointing a way for the successful determination of the truth of things. Peirce's practice consistently belied his preaching in this regard, for his exposition of the method involved a metaphysical system of considerable scope; and this, it seems to me, was unavoidable. Yet it was as a method that Peirce first presented his distinctive point of view, and it is primarily as a method that I wish to consider it here. Into metaphysics, or Weltanschauung, we shall surely be led; despite Peirce's pronouncement, I make no apology for that.

In our discussion of rigidity, we agreed to set external differential forces equal to zero, or to correct our instruments for the effects of such forces. Let us suppose that we were in the presence of an electrostatically charged gravitational body. That is, the gravitational body (e.g. the sun) would have some electrostatic charge (as is probably the case for the sun). If we corrected our rods and clocks for the effect if any of this differential force (which would certainly be negligible in any case, so far as spatial geometry is concerned), we might then expect that the geometry of the field would be the same as when the gravitational body is uncharged. But is this the case? Not at all! And the explanation is not far to seek: the charge contributes energy to the field; but energy, by relativity theory, is equivalent to mass, and mass always modifies the gravitational potential. Hence, the geometry of the charged gravitational field (which depends on the potential) must be different from the uncharged.

A loose analogy relates the work of Laplace and Hilbert. These thinkers had roughly similar objectives. At a time when so much of our analytic effort goes to distinguishing mathematics and logic from physical theory, such an analogy can still be instructive, even though differences will always divide endeavors such as those of Laplace and Hilbert.

1. Introduction. Nowadays metaphysics is so far out of fashion, with scientists at any rate, that a few words of justification may be required for putting it in relation with science, as in this paper.

Metaphysics is nothing occult, nor is it necessarily dogmatic or allied to theology. Strictly, it is a science itself, the science of being. But since a large section of being—even the whole of it, according to some metaphysics—consists of phenomena, and since the ostensible business of natural science is with phenomena, a distinction has to be made. The use of ‘metaphysics’ in this paper is restricted to the non-phenomenal mode of being. More explicitly, it is restricted to formal and general things, such as category, class, variable, relation, order. General words, which I take to be all the words except certain proper names, are, accordingly, metaphysical signs; and the metaphysical matrix is by no means limited to science but extends to all discourse in which there are general terms.

My contention in what is to follow is that in a very important sense we have no atomic secret whatsoever. It is not ours to hide or to share. More than ever it is ours to seek. So far it remains quite undiscovered.

Like good philosophers we must pay attention to the terms used in our assertions. We must point out where we meet the requirements of usage and where we decide to use terms in a definite way, although usage is vague. Thus, the term “atomic” is a misnomer, but it is a misnomer here to stay. It means “nuclear.” Like all good people we must continue saying “atomic” in this connection when we mean “nuclear,” but we must not forget this fact and substitute what we know about the atom for what we do not know about the nucleus. We must also realize that the term “secret” has at least a double use: one, which means that the knowledge is possessed by an exclusive few; another, which means that the knowledge is possessed by no one, as in the expression “a secret of Nature.”

In order adequately to refute the charge that relativism makes against any absolute answer to problems of science, it will be necessary for us to generalize upon the principal theme and attempt a characterization of experimental methodology. Only by thus determining what constitutes experimental inquiry in general can we hope to define that particular aspect of it which involves the concept of probability.

Operationism may tentatively be defined as that scientific method which defines its concepts in terms of observable or communicable operations, however carried out. With few exceptions, it has been put forward as representing positivism in contemporary sociology. Sellars refers to it as a new and virulent form of positivism—logical positivism. In philosophy, logical positivism is the culmination of the sensationalism of Berkeley and Hume, the positivism of Mach and Avenarius and Comte, and the logistic of Russell and Wittgenstein. In sociology, the philosophic assumptions of this school have been stated in a naive form, in addition to presenting Kantian idealism contradicted by an assumption of philosophic realism.

We first examine Howard's analysis of the Bell factorizability condition in terms of ‘separability’ and ‘locality’ and then consider his claims that the violations of Bell's inequality by the statistical predictions of quantum mechanics should be interpreted in terms of ‘nonseparability’ rather than ‘nonlocality’ and that ‘nonseparability’ implies the failure of spacetime as a principle of individuation for quantum-mechanical systems. We will argue that his argument for the first claim is less than compelling and that any argument for the second claim will be interpretation-dependent and, hence, not generally valid.

Memes have been proposed to explain wide swathes of human culture and language use. I argue that what is really doing the explanatory work in many of these cases is a basic mechanism of information transmission, which is distinct from memetic evolution by natural selection in significant ways. Perhaps the most significant of these is that information transmission depends primarily on the interests of the users of information, rather than the reproductive interests of the informational entities—‘memes’—themselves. Although my main target is memetic approaches, this argument also applies to some other, nonmemetic, theories of cultural evolution.