The importance for realism of the concept of truthlikeness was first stressed by Popper. Popper himself not only mapped out a program for defining truth-likeness (in terms of falsity content and truth content) but produced the first definitions within this program. These were shown to be inadequate. But the program lingered on, and the most recent attempt to revive it is that of Newton-Smith. His attempt is a failure, not because of some minor defect or technical flaw in his particular account but rather because the program incorporates a fundamental flaw. However, realists need not despair. There already exists an entirely different program not subject to these criticisms.

In the course of defending both a unified model of intertheoretic relations in science and scientific realism, Paul Churchland has attempted to reinvigorate eliminative materialism. Churchland's eliminativism operates on three claims:

(1) that some intertheoretic contexts involve incommensurable theories,

(2) that such contexts invariably require the elimination of one theory or the other, and

(3) that the relation of psychology and neuroscience is just such a context.

I argue that a more detailed account of intertheoretic relations, which distinguishes between the relations that hold between successive theories at a particular level of analysis over time and those that hold between theories at different levels of analysis at the same time, offers grounds for denying Churchland's second and third claims and, therefore, undermines his eliminativism. The paper concludes by suggesting why it is, nonetheless, not unreasonable, given this more detailed model of intertheoretic relations, to expect the eventual elimination of common sense psychology.

A system as complex as man can be viewed from many sides, and the one or the other axis can be selected to form a theoretical image. Partial truths will emerge, and their mutual intermeshing will gradually raise truth to higher levels. … It has always proven prejudicial to attribute general validity to a partial truth. Yet, a partial truth could not have been reached without overstating its value. Thus the history of truth is intimately interconnected with the history of emotion, but the latter has remained in the dark.

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

One of us (Eells 1982) has defended traditional evidential decision theory against prima facie Newcomb counterexamples by assuming that a common cause forms a conjunctive fork with its joint effects. In this paper, the evidential theory is defended without this assumption. The suggested rationale shows that the theory's assumptions are not about the nature of causality, but about the nature of rational deliberation. These presuppositions are weak enough for the argument to count as a strong justification of the evidential theory.

In a number of recent papers I have been developing the theory of “nomic probability,“ which is supposed to be the kind of probability involved in statistical laws of nature. One of the main principles of this theory is an acceptance rule explicitly designed to handle the lottery paradox. This paper shows that the rule can also handle the paradox of the preface. The solution proceeds in part by pointing out a surprising connection between the paradox of the preface and the gambler's fallacy.

In this note I test a specific thesis about the dependence of philosophy of science on science that Laudan presents in his Science and Hypothesis; namely, that the sciences were justificationally prior to the philosophy of science. I argue that Laudan's historical case studies show a justificational priority that goes the other way. I also argue that the justificational role that in Progress and Its Problems the history of science is alleged to play vis-à-vis competing conceptions of scientific rationality is not apparent in Laudan's argumentation in favor of his suggested analysis in terms of problem-solving effectiveness.

Most readers will agree with the starting assumptions of Klee (1984) that contemporary science and philosophy assume a primarily micro-deterministic view of nature–and that this has long been the case, or was at least until the 1970s. (As I will explain later, I think such an assumption has been open to question since the mid-1970s.) Defending a strict micro-determinism, Klee argues that concepts of emergence that seemingly are opposed to micro-determinist doctrine can be shown, on analysis, to be ultimately consistent with a thoroughgoing philosophy of micro-determinism. An exception is made, however, in the case of my own view, labeled “direct macro-determinism,” which he describes as “ultimately more troublesome” but then disposes of as being based on “simplistic analogies” and “metaphors” and “too weak to be conclusive.”

John Searle's provocative essay, “Minds, Brains, and Programs“ (1980), with its Chinese-room thought experiment (see the Appendix), has generated a great deal of interest and controversy among philosophers, computer scientists, and cognitive scientists.

In his paper, “Grand Unified Gauge Theories and the Number of Elementary Particles,“ Robert Weingard (1984) suggests what he calls the Extended Redhead's Principle (ERP) for elementary particles: “Two particles for which there are conceivable circumstances in which one can be ‘rotated’ or reoriented into the other are the same (species of) particles” (p. 154). The philosophical soundness of such a principle is questionable.

About twenty years ago, philosophers debated the verifiability of the statement “Last night everything doubled in size.” It seems that universal nocturnal expansion would double our rulers and tape measures making the size change indiscernible. I think that there is an internal analogue to the question “Did everything double in size last night?” The question “Did my preferences double in intensity last night?“ also raises problems of verification.

Foundations of Space-Time Theories, by Michael Friedman, falls naturally into two parts. In the first, he presents the general framework within which he will characterize and discuss space-time theories, and then he devotes a chapter each to Newtonian physics, special relativity, and general relativity. Although there is some rich philosophical discussion along the way, these chapters are, of necessity, somewhat technical expositions of the general framework in action. It is in the second part, consisting of two substantial chapters, one on relationalism, the other on conventionalism, that more general philosophical issues are addressed.