The conclusion urged in Mr Salmon's recent article ([1], pp. 252-261) is so remarkable that it may be worth recording some difficulties. He claims to rescue Reichenbach's notorious vindication of induction. This is essentially concerned with estimating long-run frequencies. By an estimator let us mean any rule for making estimates appropriate to various bodies of information. Reichenbach thought an estimator is sensible only if it is convergent, that is, roughly speaking, only if its estimates tend to approach the truth as more and more data is collected. Mr Salmon observes that an estimator should, in addition, be independent of the language in which the information is expressed. He contends that this criterion of linguistic invariance, when added to the rest of Reichenbach's train of thought, suffices to justify the “straight rule” for estimation: if m of the n observed A's are B, estimate the long-run frequency of B among A's as m/n.

It is suggested that there is a strong connection between intentions and plans, and these plans are then taken to be programs of the sort suggested by Miller, Galanter, and Pribram in Plans and the Structure of Behavior. There is then a hierarchy of programs connected with intentions stretching from the macroscopic level of ordinary discourse to the neurological level. It is argued that as we proceed downwards we arrive at a threshold below which we can still describe the phenomena but below which we can no longer speak of intentions. The paper concludes with a discussion of the criteria for the identity of intentions at various levels.

Is metaphysics possible? From the beginning of our present sophisticated era we have continually been compelled to ask this question. For myself I confess to a growing impatience with this and like questions. I hold with Kant that metaphysics is a Naturanlage, that should all science pass away and should we revert to barbarism, there would still be metaphysics. I am also disposed to think that should mankind develop in the opposite direction, should we become the supermen or the angels which the perfectionists of all times have envisaged, metaphysics would not only remain, but metaphysical insight would be the very life of that perfection. As Dante said, “metaphysics is the bread of angels.”

In unseen and unacknowledged specter, an “X,” attends at every economic feast, and stands at the elbow of every modern wiseacre. It confounds the forecaster with seeming malice showing itself only in the event and even then with impish and uncertain effect. It laughs at pretensions to knowledge; it tantalizes all figurers, haunts all generalizers and keeps itself to itself, a shadow, an unknown. But phantom as it is, it is still a force, a potent, active, generative substance, mysterious in genesis, related to a dream, but able to accomplish miracles of reality. For the purpose here it will be called the creative experience.

I. The present state of philosophy contrasted with that of the sciences. Both philosophy and science seek not mere opinion but knowledge. The sciences, however, have by now won a vast body of knowledge, and daily make positive additions to it notwithstanding their theoretical controversies. In philosophy, on the contrary, the same great problems are discussed by generation after generation with rather meager results other than a multiplication of theories and schools of opinion. One is therefore moved to wonder whether philosophy is forever doomed to inconclusiveness, or whether on the contrary knowledge and definite progress are possible in its field in the same sense as in the sciences.

According to mainstream linguistic phonetics, speech can be modeled as a string of discrete sound segments or “phones” drawn from a universal phonetic inventory. Recent work has argued that a mature phonetics should refrain from theorizing about speech and speech processing using sound segments and that the phone concept should be eliminated from linguistic theory. The article lays out the tenets of the phone methodology and evaluates its prospects in light of the eliminativist arguments. I claim that the eliminativist arguments fail to show that the phone concept should be eliminated from linguistic theory.

When Bloor's Knowledge and Social Imagery was first published in 1976, it was not the first time that a “strong programme” in the sociology of knowledge was treated to a hostile reception by philosophers. But never before has such a dialectically unproductive encounter with philosophers led to such a methodologically fruitful response, for, when an array of positivist, historicist, Popperian, and realist philosophers argued against Bloor and his Edinburgh colleagues that normative accounts of scientific rationality could not be refuted by empirical accounts of what scientists do (see Brown 1984), an entire line of research was launched that sought to explain science without having to make reference to the philosophers' cherished norms. This is the field now known as Science and Technology Studies (STS). Although STS is normally taken to be intellectually centered in sociology, its main practitioners are just as likely to have been drawn from philosophy and the natural sciences (as in the case of the original Edinburgh School) as from the social sciences proper. The unmistakable mark of Bloor's influence is that, unlike the sociology of science most recognizable to sociologists (e.g., Merton 1973), the STS practitioner is committed to studying science in the same spirit of analytic detachment and epistemic neutrality as she would any other aspect of society. In practice, this has amounted to a preference for methods that incorporate “ethnographic distance” (e.g., Latour and Woolgar [1979] 1986), although in recent years theoretical debate has increasingly focused on the appropriate attitude that STS practitioners should adopt toward science, given their findings to date (see Pickering 1992, Fuller 1992b). I will return to this debate at the end of this essay.

This discussion provides a brief commentary on each of the papers presented in the symposium on the conceptual foundations of field theories in physics. In Section 2 I suggest an alternative to Paul Teller's (1999) reading of the gauge argument that may help to solve, or dissolve, its puzzling aspects. In Section 3 I contend that Sunny Auyang's (1999) arguments against substantivalism and for “objectivism” in the context of gauge field theories face serious worries. Finally, in Section 4 I claim that Gordon Fleming's (1999) proposal for hyperplane-dependent Newton-Wigner fields differs importantly from his previous arguments about hyperplane-dependent properties in quantum mechanics.

If the currently available theories of semantic information and utility-expectation are to be applied in a satisfactory way, they must be combined with a message-processing procedure. This paper presents a model of communication within which such a procedure can be defined. In this model the sender's messages arrive over a period of time, the receiver can reject some messages and retain others, the receiver can change his mind in various ways, and the receiver can apply various evaluation functions to a “usable message total”. As one example of message-evaluation, a system for evaluating news-value is presented.

Peirce writes “It is an indubitable result of the theory of probabilities that every gambler, if he continues long enough, must ultimately be ruined … if he plays long enough he will be sure some time to have such a run against him as to exhaust his entire fortune. … The same thing is true of an insurance company. Let the directors take the utmost pains … according to the doctrine of chances, the time must come, at last, when their losses will bring them to a stop.” This note shows that under the most plausible interpretation of the quoted passage Peirce is committed to a mathematical untruth.