Early modern science, according to a misleading and now widely accepted thesis, introduced a split or schism between a world of colorless, imperceptible particles, on the one hand, and the familiar world of perception, on the other. One of the most important dilemmas of modern philosophy, of course, seems to follow directly from this alleged rupture: For how are the two seemingly incongruous worlds to be “reconciled”? This way of formulating the problem, however, seems to be based on a misunderstanding of early modern science, on an interpretation that underestimates the very real difficulties that scientists faced in putting forward hypotheses about unseen minute bodies. If we start to pay attention to the way in which knowledge claims about the properties of atoms or corpuscles were advanced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in fact, it becomes increasingly obvious that such fundamental properties were first attributed to minute bodies on grounds of strict analogy, that is, on the grounds that all perceptible bodies exhibited precisely the properties of size, shape, motion, and so forth.

Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science is undoubtedly the most neglected and misunderstood of all his major works. It should, I believe, be interpreted as an attempted rational reconstruction of the mechanics of Newton and Euler. What Kant attempted to reconstruct, however, were the conceptual foundations of science rather than the logical structure. The reasons for this as well as the particular way in which it was done can best be understood in the light of Kant's own philosophical development. In summarizing this I will focus on two interrelated issues: Kant's concept of matter, which changed somewhat in the course of his long development; and his interpretation of scientific explanation, which changed considerably.

Kant's earliest concerns with scientific explanation involved three aspects of interest here: Christian Wolff's (1679-1754) systematization of philosophy, which served as his point of departure; the ideas on scientific methodology, which he derived from Isaac Newton; and Kant's own work in science.

Any discussion of probability theory in early nineteenth-century Britain requires a specially vigorous exercise of the historical imagination. A century of subsequent thought about the foundations of the subject has made both historians and philosophers of science only too aware of how elusive and polyvalent a term ‘probability’ is; indeed, since Carnap, it has scarcely been possible to use the word without a qualifying adjective or subscript. Before the nineteenth century, on the other hand, during the ‘emergence’ of formalized probabilistic thinking, writers from Pascal and Fermat onwards were keenly conscious that the concept they used was often ill-defined and equivocally employed.

There is a sensation, therefore, of sailing unexpectedly into a patch of flat calm when one turns to such early Victorian writers (I use the term in its common, extended sense to refer to the period from around 1830 till the middle of the century) as Lubbock, Drinkwater-Bethune, Galloway, and, above all, De Morgan.

The conceptually puzzling features of quantum mechanics as a statistical theory all have their source in the impossibility of relating the probability assignments defined by the quantum state to distributions over determinate values of the physical magnitudes. While some interpretations of quantum mechanics, as well as “hidden variable” modifications of the theory, have proposed several constructions for assigning values to magnitudes (beyond the value assignments defined by the quantum state alone), a variety of theorems exist which impose severe restrictions on such theoretical constructions.

This note will deal with Bell's proof (in [2]), that any hidden variable theory satisfying a physically reasonable locality condition is characterized by an inequality which is inconsistent with the quantum statistics. Bell's result has initiated a series of experiments designed to refute the entire class of local hidden variable theories. We show that Bell's inequality actually characterizes a feature of hidden variable theories which is much weaker than locality in the sense considered physically motivated.

Position probabilities play a privileged role in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. The quantum wave function (usually designated “Ψ(r)’) cannot itself represent a physical quantity, because it is complex valued. Its square — |Ψ(r)|2 — however, is real; and it is |Ψ(r)|2 which is the fundamental interpreted quantity of the theory. Schrödinger, who originated wave mechanics, interpreted |Ψ(r)|2 as the density of a charged particle; but this suggestion was inadequate. A principal reason is that, for most physical systems, |Ψ(r)|2 spreads out in time, whereas particles themselves do not. Schrödinger's interpretation was replaced by Born who introduced probabilities into quantum mechanics. Born urged that |Ψ(r)|2 represents not the density of the system in space, but rather a probability density. This is almost universally how quantum mechanics is taught today: |Ψ(r)|2 gives the probability that a system in state Ψ(r) is located at r.

By a kinematical theory we mean a theory of space, time, and light signals as measured by rigid rods and clocks. In this paper we shall construct an axiomatization of possible kinematical theories which has two especially interesting properties: it is universal in the sense that it presents a threefold continuum of kinematical theories ranging from Special Relativity (STR) on one extreme to Classical Aether Theory on the other; and it is synchronization independent, that is, it does not assume any particular synchronization for clocks. Reichenbach's axiomatization has the threefold continuum implicitly in it, but he does not explicitly present it as a universal axiomatization and he does not give it a synchrony free formulation. On the other hand, the synchrony free axiomatization of STR by Winnie is not universal and it masks an important distinction within the light principle. However, both of these axiomatizations were central to developing the present axiomatization.

Accounts of ancient mathematical astronomy tend to err in either of two directions as regards the relationship between theory and observation. On the one hand, there are overly positivistic accounts according to which it is assumed that all theoretical progress made by the ancients was rendered possible by the increasing bulk and accuracy of observational data. On the other hand, there are those authors who, whenever they are confronted with a discrepancy between the observational report of an ancient and a modern result, are only too quick to conclude that the alleged observations were fudged (or even manufactured out of thin air) in order to support certain pre-existing theoretical commitments. It would appear from the case studies cited below that the truth about the relationship between observational data and theoretical presuppositions is somewhat more complicated than either of these two extreme accounts would allow.

Both the most controversial and the most widely publicized aspect of the “new empiricism” of Feyerabend Hanson Kuhn and Toulmin is the thesis (rightly or wrongly) attributed to them that irrationality and subjectivity play a central role in science. The idea that science is pervaded by apt parallels to religious conversion and political propagadizing has achieved truly surprising currency. The epistemological root of this view is the belief that the theory-laden conception of observation which these philosophers espouse effectively prevents any rational comparison of the observational support commanded by competing theories. It has even been pointed out that in the absence of a neutral observational language in terms of which to identify and describe the objects or processes with which rival theories are (supposedly) concerned, there can be no real basis for calling them “rivals”.

It is the intent of this paper to set forth conditions which, if met, would provide a rational basis for believing, even in a context in which observation is theory-laden, that two theories are rivals and that one of them enjoys observational support that is superior to that enjoyed by the other.

For several years now Quine has been proclaiming a solution to problems concerning observation sentences and evidence: “The dislodging of epistemology from its old status of first philosophy has loosed a wave … of epistemological nihilism. This mood is reflected somewhat in the recent tendency of Polanyi, Kuhn, and the late Russell Hanson to belittle the role of evidence and to accentuate cultural relativism …. It is ironical that philosophers, finding “the old epistemology untenable as a whole, should react by repudiating a part which has only now [with Quine's account of observation sentences] moved into clear focus.” (pp. 87-88). Attacks on the notion of observationality by the critics of positivism have been : viewed by many (for example Scheffler, Chapter 1) as seriously undermining the objectivity of science. Quine's claim to have solved the problems, therefore, deserves careful consideration and evaluation.

The problem we are concerned with in this paper is that of separating out, among the consequences of an empirical theory, those that play a purely linguistic role (the “analytic” consequences) from the rest. This problem we shall refer to as the problem of theoretical analyticity. In a sense, the problem was solved by Carnap's proposal (p. 270) to consider the analytic consequences to be exactly the consequences of a special sentence associated with each theory, along with results of Winnie, which gave further justification to this proposal. Besides Carnap's proposal there have been other attempts to solve the problem of theoretical analyticity (e.g.,). However, all such attempts (including Carnap's) have relied upon a distinction between observation and theoretical terms in the language of empirical theories. Since there has been much debate concerning this distinction, and since there do not seem to be any good reasons why “analyticity” should be tied so closely to it, we shall attempt to attack the problem of theoretical analyticity without assuming an observation-theory distinction among the vocabulary of empirical theories.

It takes no more than a passing acquaintance with functional localization research in the neurosciences to notice that psychological notions often come into play in the characterization of human brain functions. In the past, such notions were taken primarily from one form or another of associationism; currently, they are adopted from the language of information processing. A rather typical example can be found in a recent article by A.R. Luria (see also). He describes the human brain as made up of three main blocks incorporating basic functions. These functions are described as follows:

What is the relation between a scientific problem and the constraints on its satisfactory solution? To what extent can problems be identified with (or how far are they determined by) such constraints? What types of constraints are there, and how do the various types function to determine problems and their solutions? I wish to consider these questions in the context of a single historical case, the blackbody radiation problem, 1859-1900. Since only the most condensed treatment of even one historical problem is possible, I select one with a familiar and accessible history (see for details). Despite the historical attention it has received, I know of no philosophical treatment of the blackbody case from a problem oriented viewpoint.

More attention to constraints on problem solutions can help philosophers of science in several ways.

Understanding the growth of scientific knowledge is a central problem in philosophy of science today, a part of which takes the form of understanding how new knowledge arises and how it becomes unified with existing knowledge. As a way of tackling this problem, one may ask: how do new fields arise in science? And how is the knowledge in a new field related to that in other fields?

In recent work I characterized a scientific field as an area of science consisting of the following elements: a central problem, a domain of items taken to be facts related to that problem, general explanatory factors and goals providing expectations as to how the problem is to be solved, techniques and methods, and concepts, laws and theories related to the problem which attempt to realize the explanatory goals (p. 44). Also in that work, my coauthor and I discussed interfield theories which serve to link two fields by postulating specific kinds of relations between them.

Quine once claimed that modal logic derived from a use-mention mistake (p. 196). In this paper, I will peddle an, equally outrageous claim: the thesis that subsumption is an essential goal of fundamental explanatory theorizing rests on a failure to distinguish explaining what made x happen from explaining why we believe what we do about what made x happen. I don't mean to suggest that the distinction wasn't noticed (except perhaps by Hume); only that it wasn't vigorously enforced. There have always been philosophers who assimilated a belief to its justification with malice aforethought.

Everyone knows that subsumption is not sufficient for explanation: the length of a pendulum is not explained by appeal to its period and the pendulum law, and emission spectra are not explained by Balmer's formula. But the spirit of the deductive-nomological account of explanation lives on in the belief that subsumption is an essential feature of an explanatory theory.

The dispute concerning whether reasons are causes and related controversies continue unabated. The conflict manifests itself in various ways. Reasons are not causes: because reasons are not logically independent of actions; because no inductive evidence is required for establishing a reason for why I do something; and because no generalizations are required to explain why someone does something on the basis of reasons. It is also maintained that historical explanation is not explanation by appeal to covering laws and that empathetic understanding is more than an heuristic device for generating hypotheses to explain why people do what they do. It is further maintained that the social sciences are on the wrong track if they see themselves as more akin to the natural sciences, as opposed to philosophy (conceptual analysis) and the humanities.

The amazing fact is that the contradictory of each of the above stated positions has been seriously maintained.

Sometimes, when an explanandum E is a quantitative claim, we are unable to explain why the specific numerical value mentioned in E is correct. Sometimes an explanans X is available, however, which accounts for a statement E' asserting a value close to that mentioned in E. Although X strictly speaking provides evidence against E, it is in some circumstances seen as approximatively explaining E along with E'. Such an approximative explanation may be defined as follows:

Explanans X is linked to the desired explanandum E only indirectly, by means of E's closeness to E'. Hence, a special problem arises about the conditions under which such an approximative explanation is really acceptable.

In his intellectual autobiography, Rudolf Carnap describes a dispute between Otto Neurath and the rest of the members of the Vienna Circle.