The recent work of Paul Teller and Sunny Auyang in the philosophy of Quantum Field Theory (QFT) has stimulated the search for the fundamental entities in this theory. In QFT, the classical notion of a particle collapses. The theory does not only exclude classical, i.e., spatiotemporally identifiable particles, but it makes particles of the same type conceptually indistinguishable. Teller and Auyang have proposed competing ersatz-ontologies to account for the ‘loss of particles’: field quanta vs. field events. Both ontologies, however, suffer from serious defects. While quanta lack numerical identity, spatiotemporal localizability, and independence of basis-representations, events—if understood as concrete measurement events—are related to the theory only statistically. I propose an alternative solution: The entities of QFT are events of the type ‘Quantum system, S, is in quantum state, Ψ‘. These are not point events, but Davidsonian events, i.e., they can be identified by their location within the causal net of the world.

In this paper, I critically examine Harré and Madden's attempt, largely as it occurs in their Causal Powers, to secure for causes and laws of nature a kind of necessity which although consistent with commonsensical empiricism and anti-idealistic philosophy of science nevertheless runs counter to the humean-positivistic tradition, which denies the existence of any distinctively “natural” or causal necessity. In the course of the paper, I reveal the multifarious nature of their account and show that each part of that account, commonsensical or ontological, is inadequate. I indicate as well how the multifarious nature of the account allows and even encourages an evasive shifting about in the face of adversity, which shifting no doubt contributes to whatever illusion of adequacy is present in their treatment.

The complexity and the technical obscurity of the scientific method have rendered science ever likely to be misunderstood both by scientists themselves and by the general public. Difficulties which remain unrecognized constitute the most formidable obstacles to success in any field. There are such difficulties lurking in the treatment which the scientific method accords its subject-matter. In this essay, I propose to point to one such pitfall in the path of the progress of science. By exposing it, something will already be accomplished toward its avoidance and elimination, and the vast public of uninstructed persons will be able to skirt one more confusion in the effort to understand what the scientists are trying to do.

Robert Boyle's corpuscular philosophy was an important instance in the history of thought of a use of metaphysical principles in formulating new methods for physical science. Since Boyle nowhere completely and explicitly discussed his metaphysic, I shall undertake to reconstruct it and trace its influence on his scientific work.

During the last decade, in 1958 to be precise, an organizational confrontation took place: the essential issue before its membership was this: should the American Sociological Society (ASS) be rechristened the American Sociological Association (ASA). The results of the vote conclusively demonstrated that for a majority of the participants, it was preferable to be known as a group of ASA's rather than a bunch of ASS's.

In part one of this paper we shall elucidate an operational concept of logical simplicity as it seems to function in natural science. Although this is a tentative and exploratory formulation, its novelty, relative to the great European philosophical tradition, seems to require a preliminary warning about misunderstandings.

In Part Two we shall apply the formulation to social inquiry and make a positive suggestion for further development of the proposal.

Can history be objective? Is history a science or humanistic discipline? What is its subject-matter? These three questions are variations on a single theme—the objectivity of history—which I want to explore. Faced with the welter of claims and counter-claims regarding objectivity in history, there is need to be explicit about one's approach to these claims. My prime endeavor in this paper is to reformulate these questions from my scheme of reference. I want to consider the objectivity of historical knowledge from a framework that does justice both to philosophic and methological issues and to historical knowledge-claims themselves. How this philosophic framework be labeled is immaterial. What is alone important is that it does distinguish philosophy proper from both science and its methodological analysis. Confusion between the three, I believe, frequently generates problems out of whole cloth. The result is that obfuscation of issues present in much recent literature concerning history.

We make two points about dualities in string theory. The first point is that the conception of duality, which we will discuss, meshes with two dual theories being ‘gauge related’ in the general philosophical sense of being physically equivalent. The second point is a result about gauge/gravity duality that shows its relation to gauge symmetries to be subtler than one might expect: each of a certain class of gauge symmetries in the gravity theory, that is, diffeomorphisms, is related to a position-dependent symmetry of the gauge theory.

Imitating nature is an ever more popular strategy in many fields of science and engineering research, from ecological engineering to artificial intelligence. But while biomimetics and related fields have recently attracted increased attention from philosophers, there has been relatively little engagement with what I suggest we see as their basic epistemological presupposition: that we may acquire knowledge from nature. I argue that emphasizing and exploring this presupposition opens up a new approach to epistemology, based on a shift from a conventional epistemological relationship to nature as object of knowledge to a biomimetic relationship to nature as source of knowledge.

Most accounts of mechanism discovery have focused on mechanisms that perform the work required to produce a phenomenon. These mechanisms are often subject to regulation by control mechanisms. Using the example of the molecular motor dynein, this paper examines one process by which such control mechanisms are discovered—the process by which researchers, after identifying additional components required to produce the phenomenon but not directly involved in the work of producing that phenomenon, investigate both how these components act on the original mechanism and how they do so in response to measurements of conditions relevant to the operation of the controlled mechanism.

Measuring the climates of the deep past requires the use of paleoclimate proxies. I describe two proxy data and measurement practices, regarding proxy calibration and proxy data infrastructure. I document how at least some data and measurement practices in paleoclimatology are disunified: these practices do not involve intercalibration or otherwise statistical combination of multiple proxy records, and metadata necessary for proxy data to be reused or intercompared is often not provided. I argue that, perhaps counterintuitively, this lack of standardization and unification of proxy data and measurements has several benefits, especially related to the management of error and uncertainty.

The Abstract, Contrasted with the Intuitional-Causal Approach. There are two states of sophistication in the attitude which men of science have taken towards theories of natural phenomena. In the more abstract state, the purpose has been to seek the most harmonious scheme of coordination of the phenomena without raising the question of underlying causes and without adherence to some, or any, set of preconceived principles regarded primarily as fundamental starting points. In this state, the starting points have been sought in the phenomena themselves.

An important class of teleological theories cannot explain the representational content of visual states because they fail to address the relationship between the world, projected retinal stimuli, and perception. A different approach for achieving a naturalized theory of visual content is offered that rejects the traditional internalism/externalism debate in favor of what is termed “empirical externalism.” This position maintains that, while teleological considerations can underwrite a broad understanding of representation, the content of visual representation can only be determined empirically according to accumulated past experience. A corollary is that a longstanding problem concerning the indeterminacy of visual content is dissolved.

In concluding section 2, chapter VI of part II of [6], Duhem claimed:

1. (I) ... the physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses ... ([6], p. 187)

2. (II) ... when the experiment is in disagreement with his predictions, what he learns is that at least one of the hypotheses constituting this group is unacceptable and ought to be modified; but the experiment does not designate which one should be changed'. ([6], p. 187)

Dialectic, like love, has a good and a bad reputation. This ambivalence may be illustrated in different ways in almost every period of philosophical history. One may even suspect that this richness borders upon confusion. And yet, the attempt to orientate oneself in this jungle of meanings can be expected to be profitable, for the term “dialectic” has always referred, although often obscurely, to notions and processes of the first importance. The definition, illustration, and evaluation of the uses of this term should, accordingly, be a task promising some value.

Fred Suppe claims that the refereed journal article is an appropriate unit of scientific debate for philosophical analysis. He also claims that when we regiment scientific papers correctly, we can see that the hypothetico-deductive method, Baysian induction, and inference to the best explanation fail to capture the structure of scientific articles adequately. In what follows I demonstrate that the coding scheme Suppe used for uncovering the structure of a scientific paper is not appropriate under all circumstances, illustrate alternative structures found in various scientific articles, and show that the hypothetico-deductive method can accommodate the alternative structures I find. My conclusions are that the article that Suppe analyzed is not paradigmatic of published scientific articles, that different papers have different structures, that the structure depends upon the rhetorical goals of the article, and that, because of the different structures and different goals, no one philosophical account of testing is going to suffice.