Robert Boyle's corpuscular philosophy was an important instance in the history of thought of a use of metaphysical principles in formulating new methods for physical science. Since Boyle nowhere completely and explicitly discussed his metaphysic, I shall undertake to reconstruct it and trace its influence on his scientific work.

The possible relation of an individual's personality structure and the choice of occupation he makes is an intriguing study. Periodically interest in this general area waxes; recently there has been some work done on the personality determinants involved in intellectual work (for examples, see 1, 4, 13, 14, 15, 16). In the case of science and philosophy, this may be related to what type of scientific or philosophic work the individual thinks should be done, what areas he feels should be studied, and even what he takes science or philosophy to be. The purpose of this paper is first to consider briefly some representative statements about the effect of personality factors on one's approach to science, and then go on to a more thorough treatment of the philosopher's personality and the type of philosophy he does.

Carnap's system of inductive logic (1) has very often been criticized on the ground that “degree of confirmation” is defined only for languages which are extremely over-simplified. Allegedly, it would be very difficult—and perhaps impossible—to define it adequately for languages formalized within the higher predicate calculi, or languages equivalent to these in richness, and it is such languages that would be needed were we ever to formalize the language of empirical science as a whole. Thus, this criticism bears not only on Carnap's work, but on all attempts to construct an exact analysis of induction from this particular standpoint; that is, from the standpoint of “logical measure functions.”

In thirty years the science of elementary particles has made few achievements compared with its unsuccessful essays. The recent works of Schwinger, Tomonaga, Feynman and Dyson, however, have had some success. We have here a hint that progress is being made on the formal side of the discipline—though even this work is profoundly disturbing in some of its purely mathematical aspects. There could be no better time to review the situation from a physical and philosophical standpoint, even if this proves to be an over-ambitions undertaking.

In this paper I discuss a generalization of communication theory. I sketch a model of the communication situation sufficiently general to subsume all models of particular aspects of communication. Several definitions and lines of inquiry are proposed. It will be evident that much of what I say has been influenced by Bar-Hillel (1), and also that this paper goes beyond Bar-Hillel's both in generality of scope and in details of analysis. The more general aim of the paper is to suggest a reconstruction of our intuitions regarding communication. In particular, I argue that we should drop the idea that anything is “conveyed” in communication.

I propose to treat this broad topic in terms of three main questions:

1. 1. The shift in emphasis in anthropological research from culture-history-culture philosophy to “social engineering”,

2. 2. The question of whether these two types of emphasis are related or not, and if so in what manner, and

3. 3. The implications of anthropology for other fields of knowledge.

I wish to take issue with a statement in the report by Dr. Max Rieser on the International Congress for the Philosophy of Science, which appeared in the October 1955 issue of your journal. It reads: “As for an explanation of the unexpected absence of the scholars of the satellite countries, it should be borne in mind that they were all educated and grown up before the communist revolutionary upheaval and therefore naturally more susceptible of defection from the Marxist orthodoxy than the Russians. …”