The thesis of this paper is that extensional language alone provides an essentially inadequate foundation for the logical formalization of any lawlike statement. The arguments presented are intended to demonstrate that lawlike sentences are logically general dispositional statements requiring an essentially intensional reduction sentence formulation. By introducing a non-extensional logical operator, the ‘fork', the difference between universal and statistical laws emerges in a distinction between dispositional predicates of universal strength as opposed to those of merely statistical strength. While -the logical form of universal and statistical laws appears to be fundamentally dissimilar on the standard account, from this point of view their syntactical structure is basically the same.

Philosophers are continually challenged to comprehend chance phenomena and probabilistic relationships. Those cases are especially intriguing in which we speak of chance or probability but can hardly attribute this manner of speaking to our being partially or totally ignorant of the situations in question. Those cases, then, can be taken to possess chance as an objective feature. In its intent, this paper is restricted to a discussion of such cases. Among objective chance relationships there is one kind which seems especially incomprehensible. These are stochastic relationships, i.e., chance relationships between consecutive states of physical systems.

The conventionality of distant simultaneity, as maintained by Hans Reichenbach and Adolf Grünbaum, is by now so widely known that it can be stated very briefly. Let us consider two points A and B which are separated from one another in an inertial frame K. For a light signal emitted from A and reflected at B back to A, we compare the time interval for the out-going trip to that for the round trip. This ratio is called ‘epsilon’ (∊). In formulating the special theory of relativity, Einstein effectively took ∊ to be ½; thus, we may use ∊=½ in defining what is now called ‘standard signal synchrony’. Reichenbach views 6 as being restricted only by the causal relations involved in the signaling process.

My thesis in this paper is that because technology assessment has an irreducible moral component it challenges some rather common assumptions among scientists, moral philosophers, democratic theorists and philosophers of science. Quite apart from my sympathy both with technology assessment in general and with its moral component in particular, I think the challenge to established modes of thought is very wholesome. Philosophers of science would be failing in their ordinary jobs, let alone in their moral responsibilities, if, having noticed the social phenomenon of a resurgence of interest in technology assessment, they refrained from inspecting its repercussions upon the ontological, epistemological and axiological presuppositions of science, especially of political science and of economics.

It has sometimes been suggested that technology assessment is a child of the 1960’s, born in North America, weaned in 1972 with the enactment of the Technology Assessment Act by the congress of the U.S.A.

The scientific ethos of the modern Western world contains two conflicting moods, of utter lack of assurance and of utter assurance. The question posed here is, how do the two go together? The answer I offer is, all assurance is contingent on the supposition that our system as a whole, still survives, but there is no assurance for the survival of the system as a whole.

The mood of agnosticism, expressed in the music of Schoenberg and Webem (even though the latter, at least, was profoundly religious), in the art of Jackson Pollack and Franz Kline, in Buñuel’s ‘Los Olvidados’, and in ever so many other manifestations of the modern world, is philosophically best expressed in Bertrand Russell's ‘Free Man’s Worship’.

My concern with Technology Assessment is born out of my larger concern with Philosophy of Technology. What is Philosophy of Technology ? It is a systematic reflection on the nature of contemporary technology, its role and function in society and civilization at large. It may be said without exaggeration that technology is the major force shaping the destiny of the present western civilization: thus shaping the destiny of Society, and therefore, to a large degree, shaping the destiny of its individuals. It is quite obvious that technology is not a collection of tools, but a vital social and cultural force determining our future. It is not an assembly of gadgets, but a part of our world view, indeed an intrinsic part of the western mentality: whenever we westerners think technology, we invariably think ‘manipulation’ and ‘control.’

Nature is one. Science should be one. But we see that contemporary ‘science’ is fragmented into disciplines, departments, and specialties in an arbitrary and artificial manner. Our ‘science’ has fallen to these present depths under the sheer weight of its accumulated data and literature. Since no one of us can any longer hope to sift through all of the paper that has been accumulated, we face a choice: we can admit how little we know about nature as a whole – or we can restrict our areas of knowledgeability to fit our capacities, and thus continue to appear knowledgeable.

For the 25 years since Worlds in Collision was published, Immanuel Velikovsky has awaited the recognition and acceptance that he feels he justly deserves. Whatever recognition he has achieved has come from outside the scientific community; the vast majority of professional scientists has either not examined his work, or has rejected it with varying degrees of vehemence. Those scientists who have reviewed his earlier works (Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval) have been sufficiently negative in their assessments as to deter the scientific community at large from any extended consideration. During these 25 years, the scientific community has been under intermittent attack for its alleged failure to give Velikovsky a fair hearing and his theories a fair test As early as 1950, some scientists brought pressure on his publishers, the Macmillan Company, that led to Macmillan transferring the publication of Velikovsky’s books to other publishers who did not have text-book divisions through which they were laid open to threats of boycott in the large academic market.

Professor E. A. Burtt suggested that we might add “tertiary” qualities to our primary and secondary qualities when we undertake an analysis of reality. These tertiary qualities are the ones embodied in the human institutions of the world. He suggests that we may be arranging nature with our methodologies due to main conditions in us rather than due to main conditions in nature. Nothing can provide the satisfactory generalized concept of the world that does not entail extensive historical analysis of the major factors that have conditioned us, according to Burtt. The new cosmology would hardly be worth the effort, if it were merely the synthesis of scientific data or the logical criticism of the basic assumptions of that data, for Burtt Sound insight must supplement scientific data and its assumptions, through the reasoned expression of the intellectual insight of all the ages.

It has been shown by Birkhoff and v. Neumann (1936) and by Jauch and Piron (1963,1964,1968) that the subspaces of Hilbert space constitute an orthocomplemented quasi-modular lattice Lq, if one considers between two subspaces (elements) a, b the relation a⊆b and the operations a∩b, a∪b, a⊥. Furthermore, since the subspaces can be interpreted as quantum mechanical propositions, and since the operations ∩,∪ ,⊥ have some similarity with the logical operations ⋀ (and), ⋁ (or) and ⌝ (not), the question has been raised already by Birkhoff and v. Neumann, whether the lattice of subspaces of Hilbert space can be interpreted as a propositional calculus, sometimes called quantum logic.

There are many kinds of lattices which can be interpreted as a propositional or logical calculus. A Boolean lattice LB of propositions corresponds to the calculus of classical logic and an implicative (Birkhoff, 1961) lattice Li has as a model the calculus of effective (intuitionistic) logic.

One can and often does use the word ‘logic’ in a variety of metaphorical ways, speaking of “the logic of the situation”, “the logic of events”, “the logic of history”, and so on. No harm is done, so long as one realizes that these usages are metaphorical, and should not be given any deeper significance – at least without extensive discussion of the meaning of the word ‘logic’ in these phrases. In this metaphorical sense, one may speak of “the logic of quantum mechanics”, just as one may speak of “the logic of modern art”, for example.

But if we want to use the term ‘logic’ in a non-metaphorical sense – and I take it that this is the intent in all serious discussions of ‘quantum logic’–we are under some obligation to give an account of the significance to be given to the word ‘logic’ and to demonstrate that the proposed usage does not do violence to the several-thousand-year-old tradition in the field.

A few years ago at the conclusion to one of his papers, Norwood Russell Hanson wrote:

While not everyone would agree with Hanson regarding the role of observation and interpretation, I have often wondered what would have happened had Hanson attempted to make the same argument regarding the philosophy and the social psychology of research, if indeed he would have been inclined to attempt such an argument at all.

On reading the grain argument as advanced by Meehl and Sellars, I find that there is not one but two grain arguments. According to one argument, mental events cannot be the same as neural events because mental events have a continuity that neural events do not have. The other argues for the same conclusion from the simplicity of experienced quality. I answer these arguments by claiming that these properties of experience are illusory. I detail a dual threshold theory of visual experience and show that given this model the mind-brain identity theory predicts the existence of these illusions.

This discussion will be limited to two main topics, the existence of and our knowledge of unobservable entities, on the one hand, and problems about the confirmation of our knowledge claims (scientific and common sense ones), on the other. Unfortunately, this isn’t much of a limitation; for the topics are so large, and their ramifications and implications are so numerous and run so deep that the most that a brief treatment such as this can accomplish is to hit a few of the high spots and, I hope, to generate a little more interest and activity in the areas in question.

It is interesting to me that none of the three of us in this symposium knew much of anything about what subjects the others had selected for their talks and nothing at all, except by way of speculation, about what they were going to say.

In a recent article, Ronald Giere has argued that the currently fashionable union of history and philosophy of science is no more than a marriage of convenience, justified like so many youthful marriages by unhappiness with the parental homes – history and philosophy rather than by compatibility and mutual need. He allows that it is, for the moment at least, a convenience from the institutional standpoint to encourage the two to pair off together, but insists that this pairing has no “strong conceptual rationale.” In a session devoted to analyzing the directions in which philosophy of science is developing, this topic would seem to merit an important place, for it can hardly be gainsaid that one of the two most obvious shifts in the philosophy of science over the past fifteen years has been its growing involvement with the history of science; the other shift is, of course, the shift away from the empiricist orthodoxies inherited from the Vienna Circle.

For over a hundred years, one of the dominant tendencies in the philosophy of science has been verificationism: that is, the doctrine that to know the meaning of a scientific proposition (or of any proposition, according to most verificationists) is to know what would be evidence for that proposition. Historically, verificationism has been closely connected with positivism: that is, at least originally, the view that all that science really does is to describe regularities in human experience. Taken together, these two views seem close to idealism. However, many twentieth century verificationists have wanted to replace the reference to experience in the older formulations of these doctrines with a reference to “observable things” and “observable properties”. According to this more recent view, scientific statements about the color of flowers or the eating habits of bears are to be taken at face value as referring to flowers and bears; but scientific statements about such “unobservables” as electrons are not to be taken as referring to electrons, but rather as referring to meter readings and the observable results of cloud chamber experiments.

Explications of what it means for one science to be reduced to another have been the focus of considerable interest in recent years, and when the reducing science is physics (and chemistry) and the reduced science is biology, additional concerns seem to arise. In this paper I wish to represent a model for theory reduction which has occupied my attention for some years now, and consider its applicability in the area of the biological sciences.

I should state in advance that the model to be discussed represents an ideal standard for accomplished reductions, and does not characterize the research programmes of molecular biologists. Recently I have argued, in point of fact, that a research programme which might be generated from the tenets of the reduction model to be outlined in this paper would not represent some of the most significant advances in molecular biology, such as the development of the Watson-Crick model of DNA or the genesis of the Jacob-Monod operon theory.

There is a disagreement between Kenneth Schaffner and David Hull about the relationship between the biological theory of Mendelian genetics and the physico-chemical theory of molecular genetics. Schaffner believes that the logical-empiricist thesis about theory-reduction is, in important respects, applicable to this relationship and illuminating when so applied. Hull denies its applicability and its illumination – indeed, he has gone as far as to say that “I find the logical empiricist analysis of reduction inadequate at best, wrong-headed at worst.” (Hull, 1974a, 12) And he adds that “the conclusion seems inescapable that the logical empiricist analysis of reduction is not very instructive in the case of genetics. For my own part, I found that it hindered rather than facilitated understanding the relationship between Mendelian and molecular genetics.” (Hull, 1974a, 44)

The issues which separate the members of this symposium concern the nature of reduction and scientific theories. However, these issues involve primarily informal aspects of theory reduction. But more than this, they concern the nature of philosophy of science itself.

Kenneth Schaffner (1967) has set out what he terms a general reduction paradigm, a development of earlier efforts by such philosophers as Ernest Nagel, J. H. Woodger, and Carl Hempel. This model, according to Schaffner, “represents an ideal standard for accomplished reductions, and does not characterize the research programmes of molecular biologists.” Following the lead of his predecessors, Schaffner does not intend for his model of theory reduction to characterize the ongoing process of science (Wimsatt’s rational) but an abstract, formal relation between atemporal rational reconstructions of scientific theories (Wimsatt’s rational).

Philosophical discussions of reduction seem at odds or unsettled on a number of questions:

1. (i) Is it a relation between real or between reconstructed theories, and if the latter, how much reconstruction is appropriate? Or is reduction best construed as a relation between theories at all?

2. (ii) Is it primarily connected with theory succession, with theoretical explanation, or with both?

3. (iii) Is translatability in principle sufficient, or must we have the translations in hand, and if the former, how do we judge the possibility of translation when we don’t have one?

4. (iv) What is the point of defending the formal model of reduction if it doesn’t actually happen (Hull, Ruse), or if the defense has the consequence that if reductions occur, they are trivial and uninformative (Hull), or merely incidental consequences of the purposeful activity of the scientist qua scientist in devising explanations (Schaffner)?