In the recent philosophy of science literature, several authors have stressed the many-faceted and evolving nature of the scientific enterprise. Dudley Shapere (1984, pp. xiii-xv) characterizes a central weakness of the logical empirical program as its focus on the formal logical structure of scientific theories to the exclusion of the process by which these theories were constructed, thus ignoring the possibility of fundamental changes in the nature of science itself. He has stressed the importance of formulating a view of science based on an accurate description of actual scientific practice, which includes attention to how the meaning of a scientific term is rooted in this evolving matrix of practice. Janet Kourany (1982) has attempted” …to lay the foundations for a purely empirical method for establishing a theory of science” (p. 526). In arguing that the a priori has no place in such an approach and in responding to the charge that such an empirical method cannot produce an absolutely fixed set of criteria, Kourany (p. 546) reminds us of Popper’s observation about another empirical enterprise and suggests that we apply this same admonition to our expectations for an empirical method of constructing a theory of science itself.

Recent studies on probabilistic causation and statistical explanation (Cartwright 1979; Salmon 1984), I believe, have opened up the possibility of a genuine unification between philosophical approaches and causal modeling (CM) in the social, behavioral and biological sciences (Wright 1934; Blalock 1964; Asher 1976). This unification rests on the statistical tools employed, the principle of common cause, the irreducibility of causation to probability or statistics, and the idea of causal process as a suitable framework for understanding causal relationships. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to these four areas of contact by focusing on the relevant aspects of CM.

Causal analysis in the social sciences is based on two fundamental notions: model and method. A causal model is an idealized picture of the causal relationships in the world. Method, on the other hand, refers to certain statistical techniques that are used to evaluate and test a causal model using data which consist of joint observations on the model variables.

Generations of philosophers have argued that all human beings are essentially the same, that is, they share the same nature, and that this essential similarity is extremely important. Periodically philosophers have proposed to base the essential sameness of human beings on biology. In this paper I argue that if ‘biology’ is taken to refer to the technical pronouncements of professional biologists, in particular evolutionary biologists, it is simply not true that all organisms that belong to Homo sapiens as a biological species are essentially the same. If ‘characters’ is taken to refer to evolutionary homologies, then periodically a biological species might be characterized by one or more characters which are both universally distributed among and limited to the organisms belonging to that species, but such states of affairs are temporary, contingent, and relatively rare.

At a recent conference I attended involving physicists, biologists, historians, and sociologists, a question about the development of theory in biology in comparison with theory in physics arose, with special interest in the nature of the theorists in the two domains and where they ranked in prestige. The biologists, primarily biochemists, maintained that “theory had a bad name in contemporary biology.” As they saw it from the perspective of biochemists and bench scientists, experimental work was much more highly regarded than theoretical work in biology, in interesting contrast to physics.

Certainly not all biologists are theory averse. In the preface to the first of three volumes edited by C.H. Waddington, the late distinguished geneticist wrote in 1968 that he felt” …that the time is ripe to formulate some skeleton of concepts and methods around which Theoretical Biology can grow….

Wesley Salmon in Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World offers a causal account of scientific explanation (Salmon 1984). In this context he develops an analysis of the concept of causality, an analysis which marks a break with various contemporary theories of causation including the Neo-Humean view, counterfactual theory, and manipulability theory. His analysis also goes well beyond the confines of probabilistic accounts such as that developed by Suppes. Salmon attempts to explicate the concept of causation by way of two concepts, that of a causal process and that of a causal interaction, which, he defines with some precision and care. In this paper I will present a series of problem cases which run contrary to Salmon’s line of analysis.

In developing his analysis of causation Salmon makes use of the notion of a “process”.

The covering law model of explanation has a staying power not even to be outdone by Lazarus. For at least forty years, writer after writer has tried to put it in its grave for the last time. The most recent efforts come from Nancy Cartwright (1983). Her slant is at once modern and old fashioned. It is modern in that unlike the familiar charge that the covering law model lets in too much, her charge is that it does not let in enough. It is old fashioned in that the soft spot she presses is one recognized by Hempel and Oppenheim in their classical essay. (1948, p. 248).

Cartwright challenges the requirement that the sentences constituting the explanans (in particular the law or laws) must be true.

Interest in and detailed studies of development go back to Aristotle, and antedated serious work on evolution. In the 19th century, theories of and information about development played a significant role in evolutionary thought. This wave reached a crest with Emst Haeckel's late 19th century attempted fusion of evolutionary and developmental ideas through the study of comparative embryology via his ‘Biogenetic law’ that ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phytogeny.’ With the rise of experimental methods for studying development, and the separation of the study of heredity from that of development leading to the birth of genetics as a separate discipline, Haeckel's views fell out of favor by the first decade of the 20th century as evolutionary thought took on new directions. (See, e.g., Allen 1979, Gould 1977, and the essays by Hamburger and Churchill in Mayr and Provine (1980)).

Critics of human sociobiology need a new image. Intense as the joys of strangling infant sciences may be, they do eventually fade, leaving a desire to nurture some more healthy enterprise. In this essay, I shall attempt to complement the critique given in my (1985) by offering a blueprint for the transformation of human sociobiology.

I start with a point that seems to me essential for understanding the complex of issues surrounding sociobiology: sociobiology is highly diverse. Restricting our attention to what I have called “narrow sociobiology” (Kitcher 1985, p. 115), the application of ideas from evolutionary biology to the study of animal social behavior, we find a range of studies and programs that differ in scope, rigor, and intention. Almost everyone who is concerned with the evolution and function of social behavior pays homage to Darwin (for exceptions, see Ho and Saunders 1984), but this common commitment that covers thinkers as diverse as Richard Lewontin and E. O. Wilson provides no grand conclusion about the nature of sociality in humans or in animals generally.

In How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983)2 Cartwright argues for being a realist about theoretical entities but non-realist about theoretical laws. Her reason for this distinction is that only the former involves causal explanation, and accepting causal explanations commits us to the existence of the causal entity invoked. “What is special about explanation by theoretical entity is that it is causal explanation, and existence is an internal characteristic of causal claims. There is nothing similar for theoretical laws.” (p. 93). For, according to Cartwright, the acceptability of a theoretical explanation is a matter of its ability to satisfy such criteria as prganizing and simplifying, and in her view, “success at organizing, predicting, and classifying is never an argument for truth.” (p. 91). In contrast, Cartwright claims, “When I infer from an effect to a cause, I am asking what made the effect occur, what brought it about.

Sociobiology is a diverse field. Its ranks of practitioners and store of explanatory paradigms are growing daily. Thus it would be foolish to claim that all sociobiology is scientifically valid, or that its philosophical foundations can all be laid out in the same terms. But I can offer a logical justification for one fairly widespread brand of sociobiology. Along the way I hope to explain why some brands of sociobiology are less acceptable than others, and also where some of its detractors are seriously misinformed. I want to defend sociobiology, especially as it pertains to the human case. I will show that it is not a genetically determinist position and does not rely on a naive and outdated dichotomy between nature and nurture. Consequently, it is neither politically conservative nor socially pernicious, despite the continuing claims of its detractors (e.g., Allen et al. 1977, Kitcher 1985).

Theories of scientific explanation have taken different forms, but many philosophers are adopting models of explanation in which causation plays a central role. The intuition behind this idea is that we explain the occurrence of an event by displaying its causal history, or by listing its causes. As natural as this may seem, problems arise when we attempt to use this model of explanation with a system that is indeterministic. If we want to give a causal explanation of an event that is not causally determined, then we need a theory of causation which allows for causation in indeterministic systems.

Part of our folklore is that genuine laws of nature must be universal in space and time. The purpose of this note is to explicate and compare various senses of this requirement. I am not concerned to argue here that the requirement, in any one of its explicated forms, should or should not be adopted.

If it is hard to state straight out exactly what is demanded by universality in space and time, Michael Tooley has provided an example of a hypothetical law which fails the requirement in a significant sense:

Sociobiology is, in the words of Philip Kitcher (1985), a motley comprised of a variety of arguments defending biological explanations of behavior. Kitcher has shown that sociobiology offers no new theory to the corpus of evolutionary biology but, rather consists of the application of the neo-Darwinian synthesis to social behavior. In fact, one major line of attack on sociobiology (cf. Gould and Lewontin 1979, and Gould 1986) is to identify it as an instance of the worst kind of adaptationism found in evolutionary biology generally. In order to avoid the evil of just-so stories, this strategy aims to eliminate completely explanations by adaptation (including the sociobiological ones) from biology. I believe that explanations by adaptation can be legitimate provided certain necessary conditions are met. After laying out those conditions, I will address the question of the adequacy of explanations offered by William Durham (1976, 1978,1979,1982) in defense of human sociobiology.

To the memory of John D. Trimmer

This paper assesses the impact of disjunctive facts on the quantum logic read off procedure. The purpose of the procedure is to transfer a significant quantum structure to a set of propositions; its first step is an attempt to discover that structure. Here I propose that disjunctive facts as traditionally conceived have blocked the procedure at its first step and have therefore subverted the best-known attempts to read off quantum logic. Recently however Allen Stairs has proposed a view of disjunctive facts which re-establishes the possibility of reading off quantum logic. Both the traditional conception and Stairs’ revision of disjunctive facts are interesting in their own right, independent of quantum propositional logic.

Too many things are called ‘quantum logic’. The term is disentangled and notation is fixed in this preliminary step which relies on basic lattice theory.

I want to claim that healthy science involves, at all times, a synchronic tensed suspension of consensus and dissensus between working scientists, which provides both the variety of opinion and the agreement in opinion essential to coherent scientific progress. The early philosophers of science and the early sociologists of science seem both to have worked with an oversocialized conception of scientific thought, philosophers regarding lapses from postulated objective standards of rationality as the unfortunate intrusion of emotional and personal factors into scientific reasoning, and the sociologists viewing the breakdown of shared values within research groups as the inexplicable accompaniment of emerging anomalies. More recently, sociologists working with a conception of the social construction of scientific thought have reversed the emphasis, suggesting that consensus is essentially a temporary and unstable phase in scientific development, and philosophers have recently crafted a new form of philosophical scepticism for science in suggesting that it is impossible ever to establish that a genuine consensus exists between scientists.