Given the personalist's latitudinarian conception of rationality, what is progress toward wisdom? An answer is in C. I. Lewis's concept of the “congruence” of propositions, propositions so related that the antecedent probability of any one of them will be increased if the remainder can be assumed. This effect can be modelled in the probability calculus with due attention to the temporal sequencing of our learning of contingent propositions without ever becoming certain of them, as Jeffrey proposes. A diachronic bootstrapping effect is obtained for Ockham's razor and premises of arguments about a god's existence. As a theory's probability rises with increased evidence, the probability of our earlier evidence rises too.

The cogency of a scientific study utilizing historical data tends to be, unfortunately, very largely a matter of the methodological presuppositions of the reader. Indeed, the barriers to a more general and thorough scientific use of history are, for the most part, methodological. There are two such barriers: (1) the uncertainty as to the validity of an intensive scientific investigation of historical problems, and (2) the lack of a clear delineation of the fields of research.

Concerning the first, two problems must be considered: on the one hand, the nature of historical knowledge (the methodology of “history”) and on the other, the nature of scientific knowledge (the methodology of “science”). The predictive assumption of the present discussion is that to understand the essential identity of historical and scientific knowledge (though not of methods and problems) is to justify the scientific manipulation of data which are unquestionably historical. The thesis which is being argued here is that all data are historical, that all reality—whatever its level or type—is event-structured, that events have an existential dependence on one another, that therefore relationships of relevance and causation may be established, and that the determination of such relationships is the function of scientific research in any field.

Introduction: Purpose of this essay is to draw attention to some points which are relevant to the underlying philosophy of modern statistics, but which the writer feels have been largely overlooked both by the defenders and the opponents of the classic conceptions of Laplace. There is no quarrel with methodologies as such which have found their introduction under the heads of “maximum likelihood”, “fiducial limits”, etc. But the writer cannot accept arguments (e.g. Fisher (1)) which would make of such procedures an absolute sine qua non for all decisions based on evidence, and which would relegate human judgment (a priori probabilities) and all considerations of the intended use of a decision to the rubbish heap of outmoded conceptions. To assume that two rational minds, having different backgrounds and different objectives, must necessarily find themselves in agreement in their appraisal of a given objective situation, is simply absurd; yet this is the basis which underlies, so far as I can make out, all the “criticisms” of Laplace and Bayes which constitute the excuses put forward for attempting to displace those procedures in Statistics which involve “inverse probability”. Also the so-called “paradoxes” which have been invented by many writers in order to assail Laplace, contradict only this one assumption; without it they are not paradoxes.

Humans are often altruistic in a variety of contexts, even toward strangers they may never meet again. What explains this behavior? Many argue that kin selection cannot explain it but group selection can. Contra this common line of reasoning, I provide two ways that kin selection might help explain the evolution of broad-scope human altruism: in gene-culture coevolution and in a ‘cultural’ version of kin selection.

Bayesians often appeal to “merging of opinions” to rebut charges of excessive subjectivity. But what happens in the short run is often of greater interest than what happens in the limit. Seidenfeld and coauthors use this observation as motivation for investigating the counterintuitive short run phenomenon of dilation, since, they allege, dilation is “the opposite” of asymptotic merging of opinions. The measure of uncertainty relevant for dilation, however, is not the one relevant for merging of opinions. We explicitly investigate the short run behavior of the metric relevant for merging, and show that dilation is independent of the opposite of merging.

Thermodynamics is an unusual theory. Prominent figures, including J. C. Maxwell and E. T. Jaynes, have suggested that thermodynamics is anthropocentric, and contemporary approaches label thermodynamics a “subjective theory.” Here, we evaluate the arguments for anthropocentrism but conclude that instead of pointing to an anthropocentric view, they point towards a resource-relative understanding of thermodynamics which can be shorn of the “subjective gloss.”

We argue that there are two different kinds of altruistic motivation: classical psychological altruism, which generates ultimate desires to help other organisms at least partly for those organisms’ sake, and nonclassical psychological altruism, which generates ultimate desires to help other organisms for the sake of the organism providing the help. We then argue that classical psychological altruism is adaptive if the desire to help others is intergenerationally reliable and, thus, need not be learned. Nonclassical psychological altruism is adaptive when the desire to help others is adaptively learnable. This theory opens new avenues for the interdisciplinary study of psychological altruism.

Fitness has taken center stage in debates concerning how best to identify evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs). An influential framework proposes that an ETI occurs only when fitness is exported from constituent particles to a collective. We reformulate the conceptual structure of this framework as involving three steps. The culminating step compares “counterfactual” fitnesses against a long-run measure of fitness. This comparison assumes that collective-level fitness mereologically supervenes on particle fitness. However, if this assumption is rigorously enforced, the proposed conditions for identifying ETIs prove to be too weak. We here suggest an alternative model of ETIs centered around traits.

The effort here is to use the plainest of plain language. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with the tenets of Pragmatism, Operationalism or Functionalism. If not, he may refer to innumerable philosophical works, or, if he must glance and run, he must perforce accept the fact that those terms are here used interchangeably to remind the reader of our basic idea that ideas are hypotheses.

This paper concerns the ways in which one can/cannot combine extensive quantities. Given a particular theory of extensive measurement, there can be no alternative ways of combining extensive quantities, where ‘alternative’ means that one combining operation can be used instead of another causing only a change in the number assigned to the quantity. As a consequence, rectangular concatenation cannot be an alternative combining operation for length as was suggested by Ellis and agreed by Krantz, Luce, Suppes, and Tversky. I argue as well that a theory which imposes such restrictions on the combining operation is more desirable than less stringent rival theories.

In this article the question is raised whether philosophers, studying Humean problems, might profit from the empirical findings of contemporary psychology. A text from Hume's Treatise of Human Nature is analyzed in an attempt to find out (1) whether his problems are open to empirical testing. Each sentence in the text is classified into normative, declarative, analytic and synthetic. A prevalence of declarative, synthetic sentences is found. Further, the question is examined (2) whether contemporary empirical psychology has contributed to the testing of Hume's hypotheses. The answer is affirmative for some of the statements, and it is suggested that philosophical discussions around these problems should not be carried out as if psychological research were irrelevant.

Terence Horgan and John Tienson claim that folk psychological laws are different in kind from basic physical laws in at least two ways: first, physical laws do not possess the kind of ceteris paribus qualifications possessed by folk psychological laws, which means the two types of laws have different logical forms; and second, applied physical laws are best thought of as being about an idealized World and folk psychological laws about the actual world. I argue that Horgan and Tienson have not made a persuasive case for either of the preceding views.

Popper and Miller (1983) have presented an argument purporting to establish the impossibility of inductive probability. Here I discuss critically their characterization of a deductive part of nondeductive support, a point that has not figured centrally in previous responses.