The term coherence is used in many connections. We often speak of coherent reasoning, coherent activities, coherent bodies, and coherent phenomena. In science this term is often used to indicate continuity of a structure in space and time. If many individuals can simultaneously observe similar sets of coherent phenomena, we infer with some justification, first, that the phenomena observed have some kind of correspondence with activities in an external world, that is, a world independent of the existence of the individual observers, and second, that the coherence itself is an attribute of the external world. In a recently published article, to which I shall make several references in this paper, I have called attention to the fact that the science of physics is based on the form and the changes in form of an immediately observed phenomenological world, called the physical world, which can be completely characterized as a structure in space and time. In his analysis of the foundations of the science of physics Eddington has clearly shown that theoretical physics deals exclusively with structures of the type described in the mathematical theory of groups, and that our knowledge of the physical world could have been reached by our sense of vision alone. Coherence in the physical world is that characteristic of the structure which describes the more or less permanent relationship between phenomena in different parts of space at approximately the same time, or a regular sequence in the changing phenomena at approximately the same region of space.

The old quarrel between the logical empiricists or pragmatists and the defenders of metaphysics is still far from being settled. This situation is at least partly due to the fact that neither of the two antagonists has a clear insight in the historical background, the systematical validity, and the practical purposes of the concepts and methods used in traditional philosophy. Therefore further clarification is needed.

The following paper does not claim to give final definitions and decisions. It will rather try to draw the attention to certain ways of reasoning still very widespread in metaphysics and moral theory. Their careful analysis may throw light on some of the so-called eternal philosophical problems.

Michael Ruse [3] has criticized the distinction between biological function and evolutionary adaptation that I argued for in my article “Biological Adaptation” [2]. I shall show below that Ruse's criticisms are not, for the most part, well taken and that the distinction remains as I made it.

Anyone, today, with even a slight interest in the methodology of science will be aware of the heated debate which has raged in regard to the thesis of the logical symmetry between explanation and prediction, which is entailed by the hypotheticodeductive account of scientific theory. The symmetry thesis, which received its classical exposition in a well-known article by Hempel and Oppenheim [2], has been subject to a steadily growing criticism by several eminent thinkers. My intention, in this article, is to argue that the current reaction to the Hempel-Oppenheim position, as exemplified by Professors Hanson, Scriven, et al., represents a retrograde movement in the philosophy of science, which, as the number of its converts grows, could undermine the progress, which has been accomplished in the broad tradition that extends from Mach and Poincaré through the Vienna Circle to the present day. Specifically, it is my contention that the aforementioned reaction is symptomatic of a contemporary trend in the direction of irrationalism which, of all branches of philosophy, the philosophy of science should seek to dispel rather than to foster. For the sake of brevity, I propose to focus my remarks wholly on the original widely read article of Hanson on this subject [1]. That I single out this particular source should not be taken to belie the admiration I hold for the masterful scholarship of its author.

In this paper I show how the conserved quantity theory, or more generally the process theory of Wesley Salmon and myself, provides a sufficient condition in an analysis of causation. To do so I will show how it handles the problem of alleged ‘misconnections’. I show what the conserved quantity theory says about such cases, and why intuitions are not to be taken as sacrosanct.

Certain suggestions recently made by Brunswik (2) concerning the design of experiments in psychology seem to have far reaching implications. Indeed, Brunswik's suggestions appear to the writer to be congruent with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Congruences between such diverse disciplines as psychology and physics bear watching if for no other reason than the fact that psychologists frequently point to the physicist as the ideal scientist. Unfortunately, in the writer's opinion, the ideal which the psychologist still admires is the classical, or Newtonian, physicist rather than the modern, or Einsteinian, physicist—the psychologist's outlook being concomitantly distorted. Brunswik's theories of experimental design in psychology, however, are appealing for the very reason that they do not fit the mold of the classical physical experiment, but do seem to be congruent with Einstein's physical theories—with concomitant expansion of scope.

What meaning does epidemiological evidence have for the individual? In evidence-based medicine, epidemiological evidence measures the patient’s risk of the outcome or the change in risk due to an intervention. The patient’s risk is commonly understood as an individual probability. The problem of understanding epidemiological evidence and risk thus becomes the challenge of interpreting individual patient probabilities. I argue that the patient’s risk is interpreted ontically, as a propensity. After exploring formidable problems with this interpretation in the medical context, I propose an epistemic reinterpretation of individual patient probabilities as credences. On this view, epidemiological evidence informs medical uncertainty.

As stochastic independence is essential to the mathematical development of probability theory, it seems that any foundational work on probability should be able to account for this property. Bayesian decision theory appears to be wanting in this respect. Savage’s postulates on preferences under uncertainty entail a subjective expected utility representation, and this asserts only the existence and uniqueness of a subjective probability measure, regardless of its properties. What is missing is a preference condition corresponding to stochastic independence. To fill this significant gap, the article axiomatizes Bayesian decision theory afresh and proves several representation theorems in this novel framework.

On pp. 55–58 of Philosophical Problems of Statistical Inference (Seidenfeld 1979), I argue that in light of unsatisfactory after-trial properties of “best” Neyman-Pearson confidence intervals, we can strengthen a traditional criticism of the orthodox N-P theory. The criticism is that, once particular data become available, we see that the pre-trial concern for tests of maximum power (and for their derivative confidence intervals of shortest expected length) may then misrepresent the conclusion of such a test (or interval estimate). Specifically, I offer a statistical example where there exists a Uniformly Most Powerful test (a UMP-test), a test of highest N-P credentials, which generates a system of “best” confidence intervals (the [CIλ] interval system) with exact confidence coefficients. But the [CIλ] intervals have the unsatisfactory feature that, for a recognizable set of outcomes, the interval estimates cover all parameter values consistent with the data, at strictly less than 100% confidence.

It has been suggested that we can tell whether two theories are equivalent by comparing the structure that they ascribe to the world. If two theories posit different structures, then they must be inequivalent. The aim of this article is to evaluate the extent to which this desideratum holds for the different standards of equivalence that are currently on the table.

The first aim of this paper is to introduce a new way of looking at supertasks in the light of special relativity which makes use of the elementary dynamics of relativistic point particles subjected to elastic binary collisions and constrained to move unidimensionally. In addition, this will enable us to draw new physical consequences from the possibility of supertasks whose ordinal type is higher than the usual ω or ω* considered so far in the literature. Thus, the paper shows how an entire collection of infinitely many particles may place itself spontaneously in motion (mechanical self-acceleration) or even reach the speed of light in a way compatible with special relativity. Interesting implications for classical mechanics are also derived, particularly the possibility of a system of particles disappearing spontaneously in spatial infinity even under the condition of the non-existence of non-collision singularities.

Jaegwon Kim's Mind in a Physical World is an argument about mental causation that provides both a metaphysical theory and a lucid commentary on contemporary philosophical views. While I strongly recommend Kim's book to anyone interested in the subject, my endorsement is not unconditional, because I cannot make the same recomendation of the subject itself. Considering arguments of Davidson, Putnam, Burge, Block, and Kim himself, I conclude that the subject turns on a variety of implausible but received arguments, and that a useful study of mental causation cannot be divorced from scientific details of cognitive psychology, physics, and neuroscience.

Historical inductions, that is, the pessimistic metainduction and the problem of unconceived alternatives, are critically analyzed via John D. Norton’s material theory of induction and subsequently rejected as noncogent arguments. It is suggested that the material theory is amenable to a local version of the pessimistic metainduction, for example, in the context of some medical studies.

Kevin Elliott and Dan McKaughan argue that, in some cases, nonepistemic values provide legitimate reasons for scientists to accept an epistemically inferior option, a claim that they support with two case studies. This essay argues that Elliott and McKaughan have not shown that their case studies are indeed ones in which an epistemically inferior option was accepted. Specifically, their interpretation of these cases depends on problematic premises that it is epistemically better to wait for a slower-but-more-reliable method than to accept the result of a quicker-but-less-reliable one and that a more detailed model is epistemically preferable to a simpler one.

Callender and Cohen have proposed to apply a “Gricean strategy” to the constitution problem of scientific representation. They suggest that scientific representation can be reduced to stipulation by epistemic agents. This account has been criticized for not making a distinction between symbolic and epistemic representation and not taking into account the communal aspects of representation. These criticisms would not apply if Grice’s actual strategy were properly employed. I transpose Grice’s strategy to epistemic representation. The main novelty of the resulting account is a distinction between contextual representational use and general representational status, which I address using the notion of indexicality.

Selectionist evolutionary theory has often been faulted for not making novel predictions that are surprising, risky, and correct. I argue that it in fact exhibits the theoretical virtue of predictive capacity in addition to two other virtues: explanatory unification and model fitting. Two case studies show the predictive capacity of selectionist evolutionary theory: parallel evolutionary change in E. coli and the origin of eukaryotic cells through endosymbiosis.

Rosenberg argues that intentional generalizations in the human sciences cannot be law-like because they are not amenable to significant empirical refinement. This irrefinability is said to result from the principle that supposedly controls in intentional explanation also serving as the standard for successful interpretation. The only credible evidence bearing on such a principle would then need conform to it. I argue that psychological generalizations are refinable and can be nomic. I show how empirical refinement of psychological generalizations is possible by considering concrete cases. A sufficiently detailed view of the role of psychological generalizations in interpretation allows us to find in psychological investigations instances of bootstrap testing.