This paper will be a mirror image of Huw Price's paper. Like Price, I shall first introduce the “fork asymmetry”, then consider objections to using it to analyse causal asymmetry, and finally examine the relation between causation and human agency. But where Price rejects analyses of causal asymmetry in terms of the fork asymmetry, and so turns to human agency to ground an alternative account of both the causal and fork asymmetries, I defend the fork asymmetry analysis of causation, and correspondingly want to explain agency in terms of the fork asymmetry, rather than vice versa.

Our present concern originales with two uncontroversial observations about causation: the causal relation is asymmetric, so that if Ais a cause of B then B is not a cause of A; and effects never (or almost never) occur before their causes. Uncontroversial as they may be, these features of causation are far from unproblematic. A philosophical theory of causation thus has these two non-trivial tasks, among others: to explicate the difference between cause and effect-to reveal the true content of the “arrow” of causation, so to speak-and to explain why the arrow of causation is so well aligned with the arrow of time.

Thought experiments present an enormous challenge to empiricism. So much so that some of us have (cheerfully) thrown in the towel and embraced good old fashioned platonism. I'll try to explain why, or at least, why one brand of empiricism won't work.

A thought experiment requires neither instrumentation nor embodied actors. Nor does it appear to introduce new empirical information about the world in which it is performed (Kuhn 1962, p. 241). Nevertheless, it presents some previously un-recognized property of that world with a logical force that no real experiment can match. Thought experiments are easy to replicate—this confers an important advantage over real ones, though the real advantage is thought to be that there is no need to conduct a real experiment in place of a thought experiment From a rationalist position such as Jim Brown's (1991, 1993) thought experiments are either mysterious or eise explicable in terms of our ability to intuit natural kinds directly. Empiricists such as John Norton (1991) regard them as disguised deductive arguments whose performance-reconstituted as formal arguments—discloses in the form of prernises, information we must already have.

After a lang period of neglect there has been a recent wave of interest in thought experiments in science, in mathematics, and in philosophy (See, e.g., Horowitz & Massey, 1991). I will restrict my analysis to thought experiments as they function in science, although I believe the account has implications for thought experiments, generally. The two most influential views on the topic in philosophy and history of science in this century represent the extremes of empiricism and rationalism. Pierre Duhem dismissed all thought experiments as bogus precisely because they are “not only not realized but incapable of being realized” (Duhem 1914, p.202).

I believe that thought experiments do not have a life of their own. The tide of opinion is going the other way. That is evident from the ample citations provided by our three speakers. They include for example the outstanding collection ofpapers, edited by Tamara Horowitz and Gerald Massey (1991) with its wonderful editorial introduction that really does say what is in each paper. There are David Gooding's chapters (1990, chs. 8-10) on the relationships between Faraday's thought experiments and real experiments. There is James Brown's book (1991).

Criticisms of the effects of Western sciences and their technologies on Third World societies are not new to Westemers. For decades both Third World and Western authors have analyzed and protested the frequent ill effects in the Third World of Western asswnptions, concepts, paradigms and practices in health care, ecology, militarism, socalled economic “development” and its associated technology transfers.

When we think of the relationship between women and science, many of us think of a wholesome array of benefits bestowed on women by science: safer and less painful childbirth and lower infant mortality rates, labor-saving conveniences for the home like washing machines, froren foods, and no-iron fabrics, the exposure and criticism of unhelpful superstitions and prejudices, and the like. For some time now, however, ferninists have been pointing an accusing finger at science, urging that the relationship between women and science has been far from a beneficial one for women.

The invitation to participate in this symposium was accompanied by a proposal indicating that the symposium topic was “Can we do philosophy of science without taking lnto account the gender, race, and class of scientists?” My own views on the relation of gender, race, class, and science contain an answer to this question, but in the main they run slightly aslant of it. Since my previous work bringing together philosophy of science and questions of gender has consisted in using philosophy to illuminate the role gender and associated ideologies play in certain selected research programs, I took the question as a challenge to articulate a closer relation between gender questions and the philosophy of science or—better—between gender questions and my own approach to the philosophy of science.

I want to discuss Sandra Harding's claims to the effect that issues conceming race and gender lead, or should lead philosophy of science in new directions. In particular I wish to concentrate on her attempt to extend her previous feminist critique of science to include concems about racism as weil. That attempt is best found in her recent book Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (1991, page numbers without further attribution will refer to this book) and in her contribution to this symposium.

Brian Skyrms' investigation of dynamic deliberation began when he contrasted dynamical deliberation based on evidential decision theory with dynamical deliberation based on causal decision theory (Skyrms 1982). According to Skyrms, counter intuitive features of deliberation dynamics based on evidential decision theory undercut attempts by Ellery Eells and Richard Jeffrey to use dynamical considerations to argue that evidential decision theory could be trusted to agree with the recommendations of causal decision theory in the examples that had been used to motivate causal decision theory.

Brian Skynns 's Dynamics of Rational Deliberation (1990) answers questions I have puzzled over for thirty years, and suggests fresh approaches to other questions. Here I want to explore an answer, in Skynns's dynamic terms, to an old question on my agenda concerning Humean (or Kantian, or pragmatic) probabilistic accounts of causal talk:

The classical game theory ofvon Neumann and Morgenstern (1947) is built on the concept of equilibrium. I will begin this essay with two more or Jess controversial philosophical claims regarding that equilibrium concept:

1. (1) The explanatory significance of the equilibrium concept depends on the underlying dynamics.

2. (2) When the underlying dynamics is taken seriously, it becomes apparent that equilibrium is not the central explanatory concept.

Just what form(s) our cognitive attitudes towards scientific theories take, and what forms they should take, is a long-standing puzzle in philosophy of science. Debates continue, between various realist and anti-realist positions, probabilistic models, and others. The nature of cognitive commitment becomes particularly puzzling when scientists’ commitments are (at least apparently) inconsistent. Since there are no models of inconsistent sets of sentences, straightforward semantic accounts fail. And syntactic accounts based on classical logic also collapse, since the closure of any inconsistent set under classical logic includes every sentence.

In traditional philosophy of science, we routinely attribute powers to scientists that are near divine. It is only in desperate circumstances that we may even entertain the possibility that scientists are not logically omniscient and do not immediately see all the logical consequences of their commitments. The inhabitants of the grubby world of real science fall far short of this ideal. In truth they will routinely commit themselves consciously and even enthusiastically to the great anathema of philosophers: a logically inconsistent set of propositions.

Paraconsistent logic is one of those areas of philosophical logic that has yet to find much in the way of acceptance from a wider audience. By this I mean even a wider audience of philosophical logicians, let alone others. The area remains, in a word, disreputable. For some this is a positive attraction but, for the most part, it has kept away those in need of the services of a paraconsistent account of reasoning, in droves. In this brief essay, I try to reassure potential consumers that it is not in fact necessary to become a radical in order to use paraconsistent logic.

A common metaphor compares mathematics to a building: The axioms are its foundation, the lemmas and theorems and corollaries are its stones and bricks, logical deduction is the mortar or cement that holds them together. Once it is agreed, as it came to be in the nineteenth century, that mathematics is to be organized as a deductive science, with new results logically deduced from old, and ultimately from axioms, certain questions, not themselves straightforwardly mathematical, about the choice and status of the axioms to be adopted then arise. These are metaphorically called “foundational” questions by philosophers.

Does science justify any part of mathematics and, if so, what part? These questions are related to the so-called indispensability arguments propounded, among others, by Quine and Putnam. The general idea of the arguments has been fonnulated (for critical assessment) by Penelope Maddy in a recent article as follows:

One nice thing about the title of this symposium is the ease of finding a one-word answer. A disadvantage, however, is that “science” is ambiguous: is “philosophy of mathematics” included in “philosophy of science” or not? If so, the one-word answer is obviously obvious; but if not, the same answer is still pretty obvious, or so I hope it will appear by the end of this symposium. In fact, I believe that recent work in foundations of mathematics, especially of the sort represented in this symposium, serves to sharpen considerably central debates in both philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science generally, especially on the question of realism (vs. instrumentalism, or varieties of constructivism, or nominalism), and on the question of the indispensability of highly theoretical concepts and axioms for the more observational portions of mathematics and science.

This symposium was sparked by a rather sad editorial by Larry Laudan in the twentyyear issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Laudan, one of the founders of that joumal, was weeping at the decline of the wonderful post-Kuhnian Spring of the late 1960s into the arid “social constructivist” autumn of the late 1980s. When once it had seemed that philosophers and historians of science would walk forward together, sweeping aside the ahistoricism of neo-positivists and the whiggishness of traditional history of science (generally written by retired scientists), now philosophers go alone while historians have been seduced by the fruity charms of the relativists and sociologists.