Foundations of Space-Time Theories, by Michael Friedman, falls naturally into two parts. In the first, he presents the general framework within which he will characterize and discuss space-time theories, and then he devotes a chapter each to Newtonian physics, special relativity, and general relativity. Although there is some rich philosophical discussion along the way, these chapters are, of necessity, somewhat technical expositions of the general framework in action. It is in the second part, consisting of two substantial chapters, one on relationalism, the other on conventionalism, that more general philosophical issues are addressed.

Larry Laudan's primary aim in his latest book, Science and Values, is to account for the high degree of agreement and the ubiquity of disagreement in science. Arguing that earlier philosophers have either concentrated on agreement and ignored disagreement or highlighted disagreement at the expense of agreement, he sets out to provide “a single, unified theory of rationality which promises to be able to explain both these striking features of science” (p. 3). However, while recognizing that Laudan has done much to clarify this issue and to bring traditional thinking about science into line with scientific practice, I shall argue that the basic problem remains to be solved. To do justice to agreement and disagreement, we must pursue a more radical course than the one Laudan charts.

The psychofunctionalist claim that psychological terms can be defined through the use of an experimental theory has been criticized on the grounds that it is “chauvinistic“: that it denies mentality to any creature of which the selected theory is false. I analyze the “argument from science fiction” that is thought to establish this conclusion, and show that its plausibility rests on a scope ambiguity in formulations of functional definitions. One formulation is indeed chauvinistic, but an alternative rendering is not, and is perfectly consistent with ascribing mentality to creatures of which the selected psychological theory is false. This alternative interpretation of psychofunctionalism is set out in detail, defended from several objections, and finally tied to the semantics of ordinary language psychological terms.

Ever since the beginning of the modern era of science, more than 300 years ago, the scipntist has been embarassed at times when he undertook to describe the scope and objectives of science. Part of this embarassment was due to the difficulty of setting up the scope and objectives in such a way as to leave room for future development, and at the same time to permit of seeing the limitations of science clearly and truthfully. Recently in an article “On the possible philosophies of science”, Professor Malisoff made use of the old practise in philosophical discussion of using conjugate terms. These terms as used are so selected that complementary pairs characterize or describe an entity or whole of some kind. The difficulty in describing the scope, objectives and especially the limitations of science, arises chiefly from the difficulty of establishing some simple entity that will contain all of this as well, as the remainders that must be included, and that involve the limitations of science, chiefly. This use of conjugate terms offered a solution of this difficulty.

One of our more fundamental beliefs is that causal chains are continuous in time: we believe that every influence from the past upon the future runs through the present. I argue that this tenet, given certain data, can force conceptual changes upon us. I attempt to formulate a heuristic for discovery, based as explicitly as possible upon this tenet, and illustrate it by means of several examples, one of which is Mendel's discovery of genes.

The passage criticized by Mr. Linhart as “misleading” may be clarified as follows. Linhart is quite right that a method of interval estimation including a formula equivalent to my VI may be based on inverse probability, and that probability values considerably greater than zero may be thus obtained. The method of inverse probability to which I refer in the criticized passage, however, is that of Carnap, according to which (as indicated in the preceding paragraph of my paper, and on p. 16) the inverse probability of a law on the basis of finite evidence is zero. My statement that “... our method of interval estimation is superior to that of inverse probability, in that the probability values yielded by the former are considerably greater than those given by the latter...” remains true, since it is Carnap's method, which is not an interval method, of which I am speaking.

Peter Railton (1978) has introduced the influential deductive-nomological-probabilistic (DNP) model of explanation which is the culmination of a tradition of formal, non-pragmatic accounts of scientific explanation. The other models in this tradition have been shown to be susceptible to a class of counterexamples involving intervening causes which speak against their sufficiency. This treatment has never been extended to the DNP model; we contend that the usual form of these counterexamples is ineffective in this case. However, we develop below a new version which overcomes these difficulties. Thus we claim that all of the models in this tradition, DNP included, have an equal status with respect to sufficiency.

Proposals for rigorously explicating the concept of confirmation in probabilistic terms abound. To foster discussions on the formal properties of the proposed measures, recent years have seen the upshot of a number of representation theorems that uniquely determine a confirmation measure (up to ordinal equivalence) based on a number of desiderata. However, the results that have been presented so far focus exclusively on the concept of incremental confirmation. This leaves open the question whether similar results can be obtained for the concept of absolute confirmation. This article closes the gap by providing a representation theorem for absolute confirmation measures.

The author discusses some difficulties involved in the application of “degree of confirmation” to the confirmation of lawlike-statements. An alternative analysis is proposed, which is based on interval estimation. It is argued that this analysis is superior to the criticized method, in that it is better able to show how instantial confirmations are inductively relevant to a law, and in that it requires fewer undesirable extra-logical assumptions.