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.

A number of philosophers draw a close analogy between scientific modeling and fiction, often appealing to Kendall Walton’s make-believe view. I assess the models-fictions analogy from a cognitive angle, suggesting that from this perspective it appears relatively weak. More specifically, I argue that, on the one hand, the appeal to Walton is appropriate inasmuch as his view fits well with how modelers employ the imagination. On the other hand, what makes Walton’s view attractive as an account of the cognitive aspects of modeling makes it less attractive as an account of fiction.

The R-Being is, by definition, that entity which possesses all qualities which, expressed in English adjectives, begin with the letter R. It is of course unknown, at the commencement of our inquiry, whether any such entity exists, but it is nevertheless possible to determine the characteristics which such a being, whether existent or not, must possess.

The COVID-19 pandemic and global climate change crisis remind us that widespread trust in the products of the scientific enterprise is vital to the health and safety of the global community. Insofar as appropriate responses to these (and other) crises require us to trust that enterprise, cultivating a healthier trust relationship between science and the public may be considered as a collective public good. While it might appear that scientists can contribute to this good by taking more initiative to communicate their work to public audiences, we raise a concern about unintended consequences of an individualistic approach to such communication.

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.

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.

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.

A “Zanzibar” is an island of measurement values that internally cohere, but are detached from independent contact with reality. One manifestation of Zanzibars is through “bandwagon effects,” the tendency of contemporaneous measurements to agree. Bandwagons illustrate how the otherwise virtuous drive towards coherence can have negative epistemic consequences. I argue that precision is an epistemic virtue that mitigates against bandwagon effects and illustrate this claim with a case study from the history of measurements of c. This precision-first reasoning motivates the practice of blind data analysis in bleeding edge precision measurement, where outcomes can point the way to new physics.

Dewar (2019) argues that removing excess structure via “sophistication” can have explanatory benefits to removing excess structure via “reduction.” In this paper, I argue that a more robust reason to prefer sophisticated theories is that they have representational benefits.

In noncausal explanations, some noncausal facts (such as mathematical, modal, or metaphysical) are used to explain some physical facts. However, precisely because these explanations abstract away from causal facts, they face two challenges: (1) it is not clear why one rather than the other noncausal explanantia would be relevant for the explanandum; and (2) why would standing in a particular explanatory relation (e.g., “counterfactual dependence,” “constraint,” “entailment,” “constitution,” and “grounding”), and not in some other, be explanatory. I develop an explanatory relevance account that is based on erotetic constraints and show how it addresses these two challenges.

In “The Role of Historical Science in Methodological Actualism,” Meghan Page makes a number of important points about the sciences of geohistory. Yet the force of her arguments is blunted by her decision to explicate concepts like “actualism” and “uniformitarianism” as abstract methodological commitments. In this discussion note, I illustrate the difficulties that arise from this decision, and suggest a way of avoiding them that preserves Page’s main conclusions.

Behavioral welfare economics usually aims at mere means paternalism, helping agents better pursue their own goals. This paper discusses one initially promising way to inform policies addressed at agents who violate expected utility theory (EUT), namely what I call “CPT debiasing.” I argue that this approach is problematic even if we grant the normative authority of EUT, the descriptive adequacy of CPT (cumulative prospect theory), and the general acceptability of means paternalism. First, it is doubtful whether the CPT utility function measures what its proponents intend. Second, by imposing risk neutrality on agents, the approach involves a more problematic paternalism.