It is probably true that the greater number of contemporary American anthropologists feel that “theory” is a very dangerous kind of business which the careful anthropologist must be on his guard against. This statement represents, in the first instance, merely a crude induction from my experience in talking with professional anthropologists. It is, however, symptomatic that not until 1933 did a book by an American anthropologist include the word “theory” in its title. Only a single book published subsequently is explicitly given over to anthropological theory, and this avowedly concentrates upon the historical development of theories rather than upon a fresh and extended analysis of the more abstract aspects of anthropological thought. But because anthropology still painfully remembers the stomach-ache it got from the too easy generalizations of many nineteenth century “arm-chair ethnologists” is insufficient reason, it seems to me, for that almost morbid avoidance of theory which tends to produce acute indigestion from sheer bulk of unordered concrete observations. Landheer has with some justice commented:

Once upon a time in evolutionary theory, everything happened for the best. Predators killed only the old or the sick. Pecking orders and other dominance hierarchies minimized wasteful conflict within the group. Male displays ensured that only the best and the fittest had mates. In the culmination of this tradition, Wynne-Edwards (1962, 1986) argued that many species have mechanisms that ensure groups do not over-exploit their resource base. The “central function” of territoriality in birds and other higher animals is “of limiting the numbers of occupants per unit area of habitat” (1986, 6). Species with dominance hierarchies, species with lekking breeding systems, and species with communal breeding regulate their populations. These social mechanisms have population regulation as their “underlying primary function” (1986, 9). Wynne-Edwards argued that these mechanisms evolve through group selection. Populations without such mechanisms are apt to go extinct by eroding their own resource base.

In spite of the fact that the Neyman–Pearson theory of testing is the official theory of statistical testing, most research publications in the social sciences use a pattern of inductive reasoning that is characteristic of Fisherian tests of significance. The exact structure and rationale of this pattern of reasoning is widely misunderstood. The goal of the paper is to describe precisely the pattern and its rationale, and to show that while it is far more cogent than Fisher's critics have realized, it does not logically sustain the inferences it sanctions.

This paper presents a representational theory of derived physical measurements. The theory proceeds from a formal definition of a class of similar systems. It is shown that such a class of systems possesses a natural proportionality structure. A derived measure of a class of systems is defined to be a proportionality-preserving representation whose values are n-tuples of positive real numbers. Therefore, the derived measures are measures of entire physical systems. The theory provides an interpretation of the dimensional parameters in a large class of physical laws, and it accounts for the monomial dimensions of these parameters. It is also shown that a class of similar systems obeys a dimensionally invariant law, which one may safely subject to a dimensional analysis.

I develop an account of predictive similarity that allows even Antirealists who accept a correspondence conception of truth to answer the Realist demand (recently given sophisticated reformulations by Musgrave and Leplin) to explain the success of particular scientific theories by appeal to some intrinsic feature of those theories (notwithstanding the failure of past efforts by van Fraassen, Fine, and Laudan). I conclude by arguing that we have no reason to find truth a better (i.e., more plausible) explanation of a theory's success than predictive similarity, even of its success in making novel predictions.

Quantum field theory (QFT) presents a genuine example of the underdetermination of theory by empirical evidence. There are variants of QFT—for example, the standard textbook formulation and the rigorous axiomatic formulation—that are empirically indistinguishable yet support different interpretations. This case is of particular interest to philosophers of physics because, before the philosophical work of interpreting QFT can proceed, the question of which variant should be subject to interpretation must be settled. New arguments are offered for basing the interpretation of QFT on a rigorous axiomatic variant of the theory. The pivotal considerations are the roles that consistency and idealization play in this case.

Rational addiction theories illustrate how absurd choice theories in economics get taken seriously as possibly true explanations and tools for welfare analysis despite being poorly interpreted, empirically unfalsifiable, and based on wildly inaccurate assumptions selectively justified by ad-hoc stories. The lack of transparency introduced by poorly anchored mathematical models, the psychological persuasiveness of stories, and the way the profession neglects relevant issues are suggested as explanations for how what we perhaps should see as displays of technical skill and ingenuity are allowed to blur the lines between science and games.

Presentism is the view, roughly speaking, that only presently existing things exist. Though presentism offers many attractive solutions to problems in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, it faces threats from two main sources: McTaggart and the special theory of relativity. This paper explores the prospects for fitting presentism together with the special theory. Two models are proposed, one which fits presentism into a relativistic setting (the cone model) and one which fits the special theory into a presentistic setting (the surface model). It is concluded that there is no good reason arising from the special theory of relativity for rejecting presentism. Presentism is tenable here and preferable elsewhere.

Are thought experiments nothing but arguments? I argue that it is not possible to make sense of the historical trajectory of certain thought experiments if one takes them to be arguments. Einstein and Bohr disagreed about the outcome of the clock-in-the-box thought experiment, and so they reconstructed it using different arguments. This is to be expected whenever scientists disagree about a thought experiment's outcome. Since any such episode consists of two arguments but just one thought experiment, the thought experiment cannot be the arguments.

The Reichenbach-Grünbaum thesis of the conventionality of simultaneity is clarified and defended by developing the consequences of the Special Theory when assumptions are not made concerning the one-way speed of light. It is first shown that the conventionality of simultaneity leads immediately to the conventionality of all relative speeds. From this result, the general-length-contraction and time-dilation relations are then derived. Next, the place of time-dilation and length-contraction effects within the Special Theory is examined in the light of the conventionality thesis. The slow-transport method of synchrony is then examined in the light of these results and is shown not to provide an adequate method of uniquely determining the one-way speed of light. Finally, the general ∊-Lorentz transformations for events along the x-axis are derived from three principles : the round-trip light principle, the principle of equal passage times, and the linearity principle. These principles are shown to be independent of one-way velocity assumptions, and thus may form the basis of a Special Theory of Relativity without simultaneity assumptions.

This article develops and defends an account of inference to the best explanation according to which it first and foremost justifies pursuing hypotheses rather than accepting them as true. This sidesteps the issue of why better explanations should be more likely to be true. I defend an account of justification for pursuit, inspired by Peirce’s mature account of abduction, and develop it as a formal decision-theoretic model. This account provides a straightforward connection between explanatoriness and justification for pursuit.

I adopt a cladistic view of species, and explore the possibility that there exists an equally valuable cladistic view of organismic traits. This suggestion seems to run counter to the stress on functional views of biological traits in recent work in philosophy and psychology. I show how the tension between these two views can be defused with a multilevel view of biological explanation. Despite the attractions of this compromise, I conclude that we must reject it, and adopt an essentially cladistic conception of biological traits.

A theory of temporal passage is put forward which is “objective” in the sense that time flow characterizes the universe independently of the existence of conscious beings. The theory differs from Grünbaum's “mind-dependence” theory, and is designed to avoid Grünbaum's criticisms of an earlier theory of Reichenbach's. The representation of temporal becoming is accomplished by the introduction of indeterministic universe-models; each model representing the universe at a time. The models depict the past as a single four-dimensional manifold, and the future as a branched structure of such manifolds. Time flow is relativistic in that it manifests itself in a frame-dependent (but not observer-dependent) way. The indeterministic character of the universe-models is mirrored in a “temporal” theory of truth which rejects the principle of bivalence, and suitable semantics are provided for this theory. Finally, an account of physical law is given which defines it in terms of physical possibility, rather than vice versa.

Some philosphers of science of an empiricist and pragmatist bent have proposed models of statistical explanation, but have then become sceptical of the adequacy of these models. It is argued that general considerations concerning the purpose of function of explanation in science which are usually appealed to by such philosophers show that their scepticism is not well taken; for such considerations provide much the same rationale for the search for statistical explanations, as these philosophers have characterized them, as they do for lawlike explanations.

But, it is further argued, a significant piece of what is frequently offered as an explanation of well known phenomena in statistical mechanics, fails to meet this general “pragmatic rationale” for statistical, or indeed any kind of, explanation. The question then arises whether the physicists have misconstrued the value of this piece of physical theorizing, ergodic theory, taking it to be explanatory when it is actually not; or whether, instead, the philosopher's account of just what is genuinely explanatory is too narrow.

Scientific realists have claimed that the posit that our theories are (approximately) true provides the best or the only explanation for their success. In response, I revive two nonrealist explanations. I show that realists, in discarding them, have either misconstrued the phenomena to be explained or mischaracterized the relationship between these explanations and their own. I contend nonetheless that these nonrealist competitors, as well as their realist counterparts, should be rejected; for none of them succeed in explaining a significant list of successes. I propose a related nonrealist explanation of success that appears to be the most suitable among those considered.

In the October 1937 number of Philosophy of Science Lindsay has made certain criticisms of the adequacy of the “operational method” of analyzing and giving meaning to the concepts of physics, documenting his criticisms chiefly from my own writings. In these criticisms he has made statements as to the method which I would by no means accept. This is not characteristic of his paper only, for I have seldom indeed seen a printed discussion of the method which I would accept as being an adequate or sometimes even fair representation of what I understand by it. It will perhaps pay therefore if I attempt to state what I conceive it to be all about, particularly since I have never attempted such a comprehensive statement and since my own ideas on the subject have been developing since I first wrote in the Logic of Modern Physics. For one reason I have hesitated to do this, for fear of seeming to subscribe to the not uncommon idea that we are dealing with some elaborate and profound new theory of the nature of knowledge or of meaning. I believe that I myself have never talked of “operationalism” or “operationism”, but I have a distaste for these grandiloquent words which imply something more philosophic and esoteric than the simple thing that I see. What we are here concerned with is an observation and description of methods which at least some physicists had already, perhaps unconsciously, adopted and found successful—the practise of the methods already existed. What I have attempted is to analyze these successful methods, not to set up a philosophical system and a theory of the properties that any method must have if it hopes to be successful. Since I was concerned with a technique already extant, my principal method of getting others to see what the technique involved has been to exhibit examples of the technique in action, rather than to attempt any exhaustive characterization of the technique itself.

Thirty years after the conference that gave rise to The Structure of Scientific Theories, there is renewed interest in the nature of theories and models. However, certain crucial issues from thirty years ago are reprised in current discussions; specifically: whether the diversity of models in the science can be captured by some unitary account; and whether the temporal dimension of scientific practice can be represented by such an account. After reviewing recent developments we suggest that these issues can be accommodated within the partial structures formulation of the semantic or model-theoretic approach.

At least below the level of species, biological populations are not mind-independent objects that scientists discover. Rather, biological populations are pragmatically constructed as objects of investigation according to the aims, interests, and values that inform particular research contexts. The relations among organisms that are constitutive of population-level phenomena (e.g., mating propensity, genealogy, and competition) occur as matters of degree and so give rise to statistically defined open-ended biological systems. These systems are rendered discrete units to satisfy practical needs and theoretical preferences associated with specific contexts of investigation. While it may be possible to defend a realist position regarding biological relations among organisms, biological populations are “made” when contextual features determine which kinds and degrees of relations to privilege over others, and so how to bound genes in space and time. Consequently, the objectivity of population-based approaches to species genome diversity cannot rest in the mind-independence of populations themselves.