There are styles in thinking just as there are in dress. Their justification is often as slight, and once a style in thought has been established, it is followed with the same unconscious readiness. The possibility of styles lies, of course, in a lack of fixed criterions. In dress, the choice to a large extent is a matter of taste, and because taste varies from individual to individual and from time to time, styles also change. Although the foundations of science are far more stable than those of taste, they yet have some touch of uncertainty. We live in a relative world, not an absolute one, and thus there is always room for the point of view to shift. We like to feel that we ourselves and the world in general are growing wiser, and thus that while there were errors in the thinking of the past, they are now being rapidly eliminated. The discovery that some philosopher of several thousand years ago held almost our identical views is always disconcerting.

James argued that time is a sensation, and the main point of this paper is to deny that claim. The concept of the specious present is explained, indicating how it clarifies the concept of “the present moment.” But neither it nor an argument used by Mach and James show time to be a sensation. The analysis presented here requires distinguishing concepts of sensation from concepts of temporal relations. James' view is really a theory that time-as-duration is sensed. But this assumes that the description of time as sensed is also a description of time as an objective property of independent events. This is nowhere established, and making it plausible is a recurrent problem for philosophies like neutral monism and radical empiricism.

This paper is a study in restraint on freedom of speculation. In view of the subtlety of the subject it has seemed advisable to begin the report with a list of the presuppositions initiating and determining the study. These are as follows:

1). That freedom of speculation is a prerequisite to sound mental health, in individuals as well as in large-scale social units.

2). That, consequently, individual and institutional faculties are alike deficient if and insofar as they prevent or abridge such freedom.

3). That the same factors operating in one aspect to restrain the influence of promulgated theories operate in another aspect to inhibit the free conception and hamper the expression of speculation not so promulgated.

4). That as it is the purpose of individual philosophizing to surround with coherent speculation or theory subjects of primarily individual interest, it is the purpose of institutional philosophizing similarly to invest with theory subjects of common social interest.

5). That speculation in general, whether individual or institutional, is free when the prevalent tendency is for subjects of comparable interest to be accorded comparable quantities of speculation; and that when and insofar as this tendency does not prevail speculation is to that extent not free but restrained.

Scientific method in philosophy has been so greatly developed and widely accepted in our day that it seems almost ready to lay claim to the self-evidence which an older rationalism professed. It is my belief that it leaves out something essential to philosophy. I shall not attempt to define scientific method in philosophy, since it is a movement with several wings, rather than a definite set of propositions accepted by all its advocates; but its intent is clear. The theme of current criticisms of metaphysics and speculation has been that philosophy has no private access to the truth, no monopoly of such knowledge as human beings possess; it stands on an equal footing with the sciences. The observation is sound and timely; but from it has been drawn, at least by implication, the conclusion that there is no such thing as philosophy at all. For unless it has a peculiar method, or a distinct subject matter, or some other distinguishing trait, philosophy is only a convenient name for a certain group of men and the books they wrote. The criticism was made because philosophy had come to be identified with a set of dogmas. I wish to suggest instead that it is a peculiar kind of inquiry into a distinct subject matter. Philosophy is the attempt to formulate principles or categories which the philosopher already possesses, in common with everyone else, but in an unformulated state. Philosophy is always developing theories and systems, but they are tentative, not final and dogmatic; the categories are certain, but their statement is provisional; therefore, the process of inquiry is unending.

According to recent arguments, the geodesic principle strictly interpreted is compatible with Einstein’s field equations only in pathologically unstable circumstances and, hence, cannot play a fundamental role in the theory. It is shown here that geodesic dynamics can still be coherently reinterpreted within contemporary relativity theory as a universality thesis. By developing an analysis of universality in physics, I argue that the widespread geodesic clustering of diverse free-fall massive bodies observed in nature qualifies as a universality phenomenon. I then show how this near-geodetic clustering can be explained despite the pathologies associated with strict geodesic motion in Einstein’s theory.

A variety of robustness objections have been made against evolutionary game theory. One of these objections alleges that the games used in the underlying model are too arbitrary and oversimplified to generate a robust model of interesting prosocial behaviors. In this paper, I argue that the robustness objection can be met. However, in order to do so, we must attend to important conceptual issues regarding the nature of fairness, justice, and other moral concepts. Specifically, we must better understand the relationship between moral concepts and formal characterizations of games.

In the fusillade he lets fly against Foss (1984), Bourgeois (1987) sometimes hits a live target. I admit that I went beyond the letter of van Fraassen's The Scientific Image (1980), making inferences and drawing conclusions which are often absurd. I maintain, however, that the absurdities must be charged to van Fraassen's account. While I cannot redress every errant shot of Bourgeois, his essay reveals the need for further discussion of the concepts of the phenomena and the observables as used by van Fraassen.

This article encourages the use of explicit methods in linguistics by attempting to estimate the size of a linguistic data set. Such estimations are difficult because redundant data can easily pad the data set. To address this, I offer some explicit operationalizations of the data and their features. For linguistic data, negative associations do not indicate true redundancy, and yet for many measures they can be mathematically impossible to ignore. It is proven that this troublesome phenomenon has positive Lebesgue measure and is monotonically increasing and that these two features hold robustly in four different ways.

In a recent article [1], Kenneth Sayre presents what he takes to be an alternative to Salmon and Reichenbach's screening-off model of causal relations. His statistical model, based on communication theory, supposedly “has the added advantage of distinguishing cause and effect without reference to temporal distinction” (p. 203 abstract, cf. 212–213). Unfortunately his model falls far short of this grand claim, faltering before the same sort of examples I had previously used to assail the screening-off model [2].

How should one discount utility across time? The conventional wisdom in social science is that one should use an exponential discount function. Such a function is a representation of the axioms that provide a well-defined utility function plus a condition known as stationarity. Yet stationarity doesn’t really have much intuitive normative pull on its own. Here I try to cast it in a normative glow by deriving stationarity from two explicitly normative premises, both suggested by the philosophical thesis of temporal neutralism. Putting the argument in this form helps us better understand exponential discounting and challenges to it.