The epoch-making revolution that has been taking place in mathematics and physics during the past hundred years is gradually changing our whole conception of reality and of the function of science in regard to it. We have discovered that the “common sense” view of the world which has become ingrained in the feeling-thought habits of Western man, especially since the seventeenth century, contains elements of serious limitation and even an illusion both from the standpoint of immediately intuited experience and from that of demonstrated scientific fact. Moreover, by a long drawn out tortuous process, lasting over many centuries and involving the constant creation and correction of an enormously complicated scientific structure, we have finally arrived at an understanding of what may be the root of our difficulty. It seems that certain peculiarities of the over-all grammatical structure of those languages that have conditioned the feeling-thought world of the West have tended to lead us astray. Their correction, however, has so far been possible only through the invention of new esoteric languages, such as the symbolism of mathematics and the new logic. By means of these “languages of science” modern mathematicians and physicists have at last succeeded in freeing themselves from the shackles of their everyday speech and “common sense” concepts, at least so far as their scientific work is concerned.

The Facts of Causation claims to be a “complete account of causation and its implications.” Mellor's concern is with singular causation; that is, where causes and effects are singular (he takes general causation to be a generalization concerning singular causation (pp. 6–7)). Singular causes and effects come in two sorts. Firstly, there are facts. Facts are actual states of affairs, and states of affairs correlate with whatever can be expressed in a sentence (so facts correlate with whatever can be expressed in a true sentence) (8–9). For example, that Don falls and that Don dies are facts, if actual. In general terms, the causation of one fact, E, by another, C, fits under the designation ‘E, because C’.

Many centuries ago, at the very beginning of the systematic development of philosophy, Plato declared that the thinker's domain comprises “the wholeness of things;” and indeed, the earlier thinkers took all knowledge for their province and did not hesitate to discuss problems now referred to art, psychology, economics, mathematics, or physics. Since then the meaning of philosophy has appreciably changed, however, and the intellectual descendants of the great founder of the Academy no longer claim the monopoly of all fields of study. For there appeared in the meantime a mighty competitor—or should we say a partner?—in the pursuit of truth, namely, science.

The present text comments on Steel 2005, in which the author claims to extend from the deterministic to the general case, the result according to which the causal Markov condition is satisfied by systems with jointly independent exogenous variables. I show that Steel's claim cannot be accepted unless one is prepared to abandon standard causal modeling terminology. Correlatively, I argue that the most fruitful aspect of Steel 2005 consists in a realist conception of error terms, and I show how this conception sheds new light on the relationship between determinism and the causal Markov condition.

What is the relationship between the field of science and the philosophy of dialectical materialism in the Soviet Union? Ninety-five per cent of the fears and misgivings expressed by American writers in regard to this subject are quite unwarranted. They have been arrived at, not by any use of the scientific method of carefully examining observable facts, but by accepting the superficialities and distortions of the sensational press, and by making sweeping “deductions” from wholly unverified premises, or from isolated and exceptional instances. Some scientists who would not dream of approaching their own field of specialty in any such manner apparently feel that the complex problem of the relations between science and a certain philosophy within a new society can be so approached.

In his memorandum, “The Role of Applied Social Science in the Formation of Policy,” Professor Merton has stated that “… all applied social science involves advice (recommendations for policy).” While this statement obviously does not mean that the social scientist is limited solely to giving advice, it does imply a frame of reference in which the primary function of the social scientist appears to be obtaining information, analyzing it, and presenting the results to the policy-maker.

Professor Quine in recent articles has raised an old question, an ontological one, concerning the status of universals. It is interesting to note that the same positions recur in symbolic logic that have appeared so often in the past in less exact language. There can be little doubt that the question he raises is crucial; and if the issue is not yet settled, there is at least some hope that it may be clarified. Propositions are required to make propositions clear.

Philosophers who hold that the correct ontological analysis of things includes both properties and particulars have often been pressed to “show” the particular. If we are not acquainted with them, it is argued, then we should not suppose that they exist. I argue that, while we do have good and sufficient reasons for supposing there to be particulars, we are not acquainted with them. To suppose that we are acquainted with them is to treat particulars as if they were properties and to fail to realize how radically different particulars are from properties. The relevance of these matters to some considerations of “simplicity” and the principles of empiricism is explored.

The editor of this Journal has asked me to comment on the preceding paper by Professor Hammond (5) in which certain parallels are drawn between relativity physics and my own suggestions concerning the establishment of “representative design” in psychological experimentation (1). Since I find little basis for criticism of Dr. Hammond's major line of reasoning, I shall concentrate on anticipating possible objections to Hammond's comparison as well as on elucidating my point of view by means of examples, both old and new, that seem pertinent in the present context.

Rather than taking the ontological fundamentality of an ideal microphysics as a starting point, this article sketches an approach to the problem of levels that swaps assumptions about ontology for assumptions about inquiry. These assumptions can be implemented formally via computational modeling techniques that will be described below. It is argued that these models offer a way to save some of our prominent commonsense intuitions concerning levels. This strategy offers a way of exploring the individuation of higher level properties in a systematic and formally constrained manner.

In this paper we attempt to formulate logical foundations for a theory of actions or performance. Human beings act in various ways, and their actions are intimately interrelated with their use of language. But precisely how actions and the use of language are interrelated is not very clear. One of the reasons is perhaps that we have no precise vocabulary in terms of which such interrelations may be handled. There is need for developing a systematic theory in which different kinds of actions may be discussed, contrasted, and compared. Then the various interrelations between actions and linguistic usage may perhaps be discussed rather more carefully and thoroughly than heretofore.

Although much important preliminary work has been done in the analysis of actions, no one it seems has attempted to develop a strict logical theory for such analysis. A few tentative and programmatic steps were taken in the author's Toward a Systematic Pragmatics.1 Let us attempt here to improve those and take a few more. Any first attempts of this kind are of course fraught with difficulties. There inevitably will be some oversimplification or some overelaboration here or there. Ultimately of course we are interested in interrelating performance with various notions from syntax, semantics, and quantitative pragmatics.2 But this is not easy and only a few tentative suggestions toward such a development can be given here.

In § 1 the distinction between action-kinds and action-events is drawn, and the character of the primitive or primitives needed for the theory of performance is discussed. In § 2 some further notions are then defined. Certain Rules of Performance are suggested in § 3. In § 4 there is discussion of the somewhat tenuous notion of acceptance as a basis for action. In § 5 the fundamental notions required for Parsons and Shils’ theory of social action is discussed briefly. In § 6 we attempt to define the two basic notions required in Leonard's recent papers concerning authorship and purpose. Finally, in § 7, the theory of performance is interrelated with von Wright's deontic logic, in which such notions as permission and obligation are considered.

The coherence of independent reports provides a strong reason to believe that the reports are true. This plausible claim has come under attack from recent work in Bayesian epistemology. This work shows that, under certain probabilistic conditions, coherence cannot increase the probability of the target claim. These theorems are taken to demonstrate that epistemic coherentism is untenable. To date no one has investigated how these results bear on different conceptions of coherence. I investigate this situation using Thagard’s ECHO model of explanatory coherence. Thagard’s ECHO model provides a natural representation of the evidential significance of multiple independent reports.