Contemporary scientific theories assume a primarily micro-deterministic view of nature. This paper explores the question of whether micro-determinism is incompatible with the alleged emergence of properties and laws that some biologists and philosophers assert occurs in various biological systems. I argue that a preferable unified treatment of these emergence claims takes properties, rather than laws, to be the units of emergence. Four distinct conceptions of emergence are explored and three shown to be compatible with micro-determinism. The remaining concept of emergence, direct macro-determination, does not, I argue, meet the general requirement that an adequate scientific explanation provide a coherent mechanism or effective means of determination.

I defend a view of the species category, pluralistic realism, which is designed to do justice to the insights of many different groups of systematists. After arguing that species are sets and not individuals, I proceed to outline briefly some defects of the biological species concept. I draw the general moral that similar shortcomings arise for other popular views of the nature of species. These shortcomings arise because the legitimate interests of biology are diverse, and these diverse interests are reflected in different legitimate approaches to the classification of organisms. In the final section, I show briefly how the pluralistic approach can help to illuminate some areas of biological and philosophical dispute.

Woodfield's analysis of teleology, though it has many virtures, nevertheless exhibits defects that are by no means peripheral. The acknowledged unity of teleological statements is removed because of the unnoticed difference between something being good and something appearing good. It is removed again because “good” does not have one meaning throughout but means desired in purposive and artifact-function TDs and beneficial in behavioral function and biological function TDs. In addition, the analyses of purposive and artifact-function TDs incorrectly claim that all goals are desired. Further, if “desired” is substituted for “good,” those same analyses become incoherent. Finally, the interpretation of “belief” assigned to “S believes B is good” makes unintelligible “S believes B causally contributes to G.”

I investigate substitutional interpretations of quantifiers that count existential sentences true just in case they have true instances in a parametric extension of the language. I devise a semantics meeting four criteria: (1) it accounts adequately for natural language quantification; (2) it provides an account of justification in abstract sciences; (3) it constitutes a continuous semantics for natural and formal languages; and (4) it is purely substitutional, containing no appeal to referential interpretations. The prospects for a purely substitutional theory of quantification are thus no worse than for a referential account.

Quine's (1969) proposal that the foundationalist programs in epistemology should be abandoned in favor of a scientific study of how we come to hold our theories about the world is still widely misunderstood. It does not eliminate the possibility of rational adjudication of scientific dispute, nor is it essentially tied to behaviorist approaches in psychology. On the contrary, recent work in psychology and philosophy of science can very naturally be seen as embodying the sort of program envisioned by Quine; now freed of behaviorist strictures, it clearly addresses issues that have been of interest in traditional epistemology. This view is defended with particular attention to Quine's concerns with translation and the related concerns with belief individuation which have inspired critics of recent cognitive psychology.

Alexander Rosenberg (1983) has argued, contrary to his previous work in the philosophy of economics, that economics is not science, and it is merely mathematics. The following paper argues that Rosenberg fails to demonstrate either of these two claims. The questions of the predictive weakness of modern economics and the cognitive standing of abstract economic theory are discussed in detail.

Robert Cummins has recently used the program of Clark Hull to illustrate the effects of logical positivist epistemology upon psychological theory. On Cummins's account, Hull's theory is best understood as a functional analysis, rather than a nomological subsumption. Hull's commitment to the logical positivist view of explanation is said to have blinded him to this aspect of his theory, and thus restricted its scope. We will argue that this interpretation of Hull's epistemology, though common, is mistaken. Hull's epistemological views were developed independently of, and in considerable contrast to, the principles of logical positivism.

In his book, The Scientific Image, van Fraassen lucidly draws an alternative to scientific realism, which he calls “Constructive Empiricism”. In this epistemological theory, the concept of observability plays the pivotal role: acceptable theories may be believed only where what they say solely concerns observables. Van Fraassen develops a concept of observability which is, as he admits, vague, relative, science-dependent, and anthropocentric. I draw out unacceptable consequences of each of these aspects of his concept. Also, I argue against his assumption that “empirical adequacy” is the same thing as “saving the phenomena”, according to his sense of the expressions.

In his review of my Prelude to Galileo (1981a), Ernan McMullin rejects my emendation of Pierre Duhem's “continuity thesis” wherein I develop the case for a pronounced medieval-scholastic influence on Galileo's science based on parallels between Galileo's early Latin compositions and lectures given by contemporary Jesuits at the Collegio Romano (McMullin 1983). He does so on two grounds: (1) that the evidence of derivation I provide, using textual parallels, is so strong that it refutes the claim for any intellectual influence, being a better instance of mindless copying than one of personal appropriation; and (2) that, in any event, the logical structure of the argument which I attribute to Galileo's mature work is not that of demonstration ex suppositione as understood by Aquinas, and so the example I provide of Galileo's use of suppositio “does not link him in any significant way to the specifically Thomist tradition of natural science” (1983, p. 173). An adequate reply to this critique would require the introduction of more historical evidence than would be appropriate for the pages of this journal. A few remarks, however, may be in order concerning such evidence which bears directly on McMullin's first ground, and concerning the implications of this evidence for contemporary philosophy of science, which bear on his second.

In his 1983 article, Paul A. Roth defends the Quinean project of naturalized epistemology from the criticism presented in my 1980 article. In this note I would like to respond to Roth's effort. I will argue that, while helpful in advancing and clarifying the issues, Roth's defense of naturalized epistemology does not succeed. The primary topic to be clarified is Quine's “no first philosophy” doctrine; but I will address myself to other points as well.

Malcolm Acock (1983) attempts to show that three widely accepted “solutions” to the philosophical problem of theory choice between the ordinary account of the age of the universe, and “Russell's hypothesis” that the world sprang into existence five minutes ago, are unsatisfactory. In the following paper we shall attempt to show why “Russell's hypothesis” is defective as a cosmological explanation of the age of the universe.

Several years ago, I was asked to participate in a forum on evolution. Flattered, I accepted, only discovering later that I was to participate in a “debate”, involving me and a scientist squaring off against two Creationists, Henry M. Morris and Duane T. Gish. The topic for discussion was which doctrine has the greatest scientific merit: organic evolution through natural processes (like natural selection) set against the background of a very old earth (about 4½ billion years), or special instantaneous appearance of all organisms, about 6000 years ago, followed shortly thereafter by a world-wide flood? I very much doubt that many minds were changed on that particular evening—the bleachers were packed with ardent Baptists bussed in from all over Wisconsin and Illinois. The 10 or so in the audience who believed in evolution went on believing in evolution. The 5000 in the audience who took the early chapters of Genesis absolutely literally went on taking the early chapters of Genesis absolutely literally. But, people's time was far from wasted. Morris and Gish got the attention they crave. Their supporters were thrilled by the sight of heretics publicly proclaiming doctrines for which they would surely earn eternal damnation. And, I learnt what a hollow sham modern day Creationism really is: crude, dogmatic, Biblical literalism, masquerading as genuine science, in order to avoid the strictures of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which bars the teaching of religion in schools.

Jaynes contends that in many statistical problems a seemingly indeterminate probability distribution is made unique by the transformation group of necessarily implied invariance properties, thereby justifying the principle of indifference. To illustrate and substantiate his claims he considers Bertrand's Paradox. These assertions are here refuted and the traditional attitude is vindicated.

In Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science are found a dynamist reduction of matter and an account of the communication of motion by impact. One would expect to find an analysis of the causal mechanism involved in the communication of motion between bodies given in terms of the fundamental dynamical nature of bodies. However, Kant's analysis, as given in the discussion of his third law of mechanics (an action-reaction law) is purely kinematical, invoking no causal mechanisms at all, let alone dynamist mechanisms, in the explanation. It is argued that the reason for the non-incorporation of Kant's theory of matter in the account of impact is his overriding desire to provide a mathematical framework to explain the communication of motion, a provision which Kant felt to be impossible in the context of a metaphysical dynamism.

The use of a concept called “explicativity”, for (provisionally) accepting a theory or Hypothesis H, has previously been discussed. That previous discussion took into account the prior probability of H, and hence implicitly its theoretical simplicity. We here suggest that a modification of explicativity is required to allow for what may be called the pragmatic simplicity of H, that is, the simplicity of using H in applications as distinct from the simplicity of the description of H.

The existence of fields besides gravitation may provide us with a way to decide empirically whether spacetime is really a nonflat Riemannian manifold or a flat Minkowskian manifold that appears curved as a result of gravitational distortions. This idea is explained using a modification of Poincaré's famous ‘diskworld’.