The theory of explanatory unification was first proposed by Michael Friedman (1974) and developed in more detail by Philip Kitcher (1981,1989). The primary motivation for this theory is the case that the theory adequately accounts for the genesis of scientific understanding. Standard models of explanation are, moreover, allegedly constructed on the basis of a misconception of the nature of understanding. My thesis is that the unificationist account of understanding proposed by Friedman and Kitcher is false, and hence, that the theory of explanatory unification is fundamentally misconceived.

How does an explanation of some explanandum render the explanandum as ‘understood’? Carl Hempel wrote of the D-N covering law model that it shows that “given the particular circumstances and the laws in question, the occurrence of the phenomenon was to be expected; and it is in this sense that the explanation allows us to understand why the phenomenon occurred.”

The demise of foundationalism in epistemology was complete by the time of the Second World War: knowledge and rational opinion do not rest on absolutely secure, self-authenticating foundations, neither in experience nor elsewhere. This realization came to philosophers in large measure at the hands of that same detested logical positivism so often been depicted as foundationalism's last gasp. (Cf. Reichenbach (1938), Ch. 3; in a larger historical perspective, the demise may possibly be dated much earlier.) I will not argue for this; I take the demise for granted. The task which lay, and still lies, before us is to find a way of life after foundationalism.

The debate about values in science in the last decade or so reflects an important shift in what many acknowledge as the “post-positivist” era in philosophy of science. It reflects the erosion of the fact-value distinction in at least one of its more simplistic forms (facts belong in science, values outside), and it marks the path to a more enhanced understanding of the roles of both facts and values in scientific inquiry. This discussion has, above all, contributed to what we might call a revaluation of value: from the point of view of the epistemologist or philosopher of science values are neither uniform nor uniformly “bad”.

I would like to begin by addressing two pressing questions that may be raised regarding chaos theory: Is it actually about “chaos” at all? And is it actually a “theory?” The short answers to these questions are, respectively, “no” and “it depends.” With respect to the first question, scientists have appropriated the ordinary term that means utterly unintelligible disorder. But chaotic behavior in the contemporary scientific sense is manifestly intelligible, and the word “chaos” may lead to rnisunderstandings as weil as legitimate interest. So, in the first part of my presentation, I will offer a characterization of chaos theory and briefly address the use of this term in scientific enterprises.

As is weil known there has been an explosion of interest in classical dynarnics resulting from the relatively recent “discovery” that classical deterministic systems can be chaotic or in some sense random. Actually, their complexity had already been weil appreciated by Poincare in 1892 (MacKay, R. S. and Meiss, J. D. (1987), p. 7). Much interesting work is currently being done on classical chaos in both physics and philosophy. However, in the last fifteen years or so, the interest of some physicists has turned to the possibility that chaos, or chaotic behavior can be found in quantum mechanics as weil. Unfortunately, things are much less clear cut in the quantum case than in the classical. In fact, there is very little agreement about whether chaos in quantum mechanics even exists. In part this is because there is apparently no generally accepted definition of what chaos in quantum mechanics could be.

According to a recent argument, models play two essential roles in the argumentative structure of solid state physics and chemistry (Hofmann 1990). On the one hand, models are the culmination of phenomenological description. That is, models are idealized representations of the molecular structures thought to be causally responsible for the processes experimentally monitored and measured. Secondly, dieoretical physicists and chemists require that models ultimately be cast in a mathematical form appropriate for the application of the Schroedinger equation. In this respect models become the means through which the Schroedinger equation gives a theoretical unity to what would otherwise be a disparate set of empirical phenomenological laws and descriptions with limited scope. That is, it is an important theoretical goal to show that experimentally generated phenomenological laws can be approximately derived through an application of the Schroedinger equation to a necessarily idealized and simplified mathematical description of the relevant system. The two functions of models are not incompatible, but they do reflect two distinct theoretical orientations toward the interpretation of data.

For a number of years now, we, as philosophers of science, have been enjoined by more and more of our colleagues to understand the task of developing a philosophy of science to be itself a scientific task. We are told that if we want to understand science we have no better (and perhaps indeed no other) path to such an understanding than the path of science itself. We should view ourselves as ultimately attempting to arrive at a relatively complete theoretical understanding of how science proceeds. This is a call to naturalize philosophy of science.

Somewhat more recently some philosophers of science have become impatient even with those who have taken up the naturalist banner. It isn’t enough, they tell us, to arrive at an understanding of the nature of philosophy of science that proclaims it to be one science among many.

I wish to describe a program of research designed to provide experimental evidence for or against the existence of altruisrn in humans (also see, Batson 1991). Whether such an enterprise is at all newsworthy—or at all worth doing—depends, of course, on what one means by altruism.

I have worked with the following definition: Altruism is a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing another's welfare. I have juxtaposed altruism to egoism, defined as a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing one's own welfare. Altruism and egoism, thus defined, have much in common. Each refers to goal-directed motivation; each is concemed with the ultimate goal of this motivation; and for each, the ultimate goal is to increase someone's welfare.

Among cognitive ethologists, communication is widely supposed to be a good area for comparing animal minds (e.g., Cheney & Seyfarth 1990; Griffin 1991, and other contributions to Ristau 1991). There is, however, considerable controversy about how to define or characterize communication. We will not survey these attempts in this paper (see Philips & Austad 1990). Rather, we focus on conceptions of communication as transfer of informationfrom signaler to receiver. In conjunction with descriptions of human cognition in information processing terms, this conception encourages the idea that communication provides a “window” on animal thoughts’ (Griffin 1991, p.3). The first step in getting beyond this metaphor is to identify possible relationships between information and cognition. This paper attempts that first step.

Traditional accounts of the relationship between experimental evidence and hypotheses have been challenged in the recent work of Hacking (1983), Galison (1987), and Franklin (1986,1990). These authors have pointed to the independent aspects of the experimental tradition and forced us to rethink the view that experiment is simply the handmaid of theory. As a result we have come to recognize the tremendous intricacies involved in theory testing and experimentation and have come to appreciate the various ways experiment shapes scientific practice.

In what follows I want to extend this discussion by taking a closer look at the way in which theories are supported by empirical evidence. In addition to the traditional testing model the method of deduction from phenomena, made famous by Newton, is also thought to furnish experimental evidence insofar as the theory itself is supposedly deduced from empirical data.

Many philosophers of science tend to take for granted the proposition that, as a rule, scientific experiments are reproducible (or, in other words, repeatable, replicable). Very few of them, however, have examined the issue in any detail (a recent exception is Hones 1990). Yet, by now an important body of literature exists, mainly written by sociologists and historians of science, in which the above proposition is discussed and analyzed on the basis of elaborate studies of experimental practice. These studies claim to offer not only a descriptively adequate account of experimentation, but also a number of fundamental philosophical conclusions concerning (experimental) science as a whole.

In the present paper I analyze and evaluate the views of H.M. Collins, an early and influential thinker concerning the issue in question. In particular I discuss what he has called the ‘experimenters’ regress’.

Apparently stupid animals often do remarkably intelligent things. Leaf-cutting ants, for example, “plant” leaves in underground farms, where they cultivate particular species of fungus to provision their colony. In so doing, the ants act as if they understand the environrnental conditions that optimize fungus growth. Entomologists studying this behavior, however, are rarely tempted to interpret the ants’ activities as conscious or goal-directed. Instead, they view them as relatively inflexible adaptations to particular selective pressures. Ants are good at cultivating fungus, but this is not taken as proof of any general skills in problem solving or learning.

How is the deep disagreement between what Kuhn characterized as paradigms ultimately resolved and how do we interpret such debates epistemically? A close analysis of the Ox-Phos Controversy in bioenergetics from the 1960s and 70s (§§2-3 below) suggests that one justifies a set of questions through an ensemble of empirical demonstrations. This contrasts to decisions between theoretical alternatives through ‘crucial experiments'. When viewed along with other historical episodes, this case suggests a philosophical category of ‘demonstrations', distinguished from crucial tests and complementary in justificatory status to falsifying instances. The distinction also suggests specific strategies for scientists (§4).

The Ox-Phos Controversy is an especially valuable case for studying theory development and scientific change, and for investigating the problems of disagreement, originally highlighted by Kuhn, where two incompatible conceptual or experimental gestalts converge on the same empirical domain (see also Gilbert and Mulkay 1984a; 1984b; Robinson 1984; 1986; Rowen 1986; Weber 1986; 1991; Allchin 1990; 1991).

In 1963 Niko Tinbergen published a paper, “On Aims and Methods of Ethology,” dedicated to his friend Konrad Lorenz. This essay is a landmark in the development of ethology. Here Tm bergen defines ethology as “the biological study of behavior” and seeks to demonstrate the “close affinity between Ethology and the rest of Biology” (p. 411). Building on Huxley (1942), Tinbergen identifies four major problems of ethology: causation, survival value, evolution, and ontogeny. Cancern with these problems, under different names (mechanism, adaptation, phylogeny, and development), has dominated the study of animal behavior during the last half century (Dawkins, et al. 1991; Dewsbury 1992).