Mr. Sharp's resolution of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox is, in my opinion, the right one. However, the resolution does not in my opinion show that “God's in his heaven; all's right with the world (quantum mechanics).” This is in no way a criticism of Sharp; rather, it is inevitable that any resolution of this paradox, dealing as it does with the quantum mechanical concept of “measurement”, must tangle with some of the real difficulties which are lurking in the notion. The purpose of these comments is to use Mr. Sharp's remarks as a basis for bringing out one of the serious conceptual difficulties connected with measurement.

Scientific models may be more useful for false assumptions they make than true ones when one is interested not in the fit of the model, but in the form of the residuals. Modeling Darwin's (false) “blending” theory of inheritance shows how it illuminates features of Mendelian theory. Insufficient understanding of it leads to incorrect moves in modeling population structure. But it may prove even more useful for organizing a theory of cultural evolution. Analysis of “blending” inheritance gives new tools for recognizing population structure for culture and for understanding differences between biological and cultural inheritance.

In his discussion of “Scientific Explanation and the Sense of Understanding” (Trout 2002), de Regt (2004) argues that Trout “denounces understanding as irrelevant, if not dangerous, from an epistemic perspective…” (de Regt 2004, 98), and that Trout prefers “a thoroughly objectivist view, in which understanding has no epistemic function and explanations require only accurate theories” (100). I argue that this is a fundamental misinterpretation of the objectivist proposal of Trout (2002), and that it results from de Regt's failure to address the distinction announced there between genuine and counterfeit understanding. De Regt also advances a pragmatic alternative to my realist account of understanding in scientific explanation, one that focuses on the skills of scientists and the intelligibility of theories. After supplementing my earlier account of genuine understanding, I argue that de Regt's pragmatic account obscures the nature of scientific explanation, and is vulnerable on several additional fronts.

Large changes of financial market prices without exogenous causes deviate significantly from the Gaussian behavior of random variables. This indicates that financial markets should be treated as complex systems, for which nonlinear interactions of its subunits/agents are crucial. I focus on how the complex systems perspective impacts the notion of explanations in economics. The mechanistic model seems to fit the bill, but problems surface on closer scrutiny. One characteristic of complex systems is that their behavior is surprisingly independent from microscopic details. Thus, mechanistic explanations in the microreductionist manner seem unavailable. Despite these conflicts, I defend a modified structural mechanistic approach.

In several places we have argued that ‘fitness’ is a primitive term with respect to the theory of evolution properly understood (Rosenberg 1978, 1982, 1983; Williams 1976). These arguments have relied heavily on the axiomatization of the theory provided by one of us (Williams 1970). In contrast, both John Beatty and Robert Brandon have separately argued for a “propensity“ interpretation of “fitness” (Mills and Beatty 1979; Brandon 1978); and in Brandon and Beatty (1984) they attack our view that “fitness“ is a primitive term in evolutionary theory, concluding that a definition by way of propensities is possible and preferable. Here we reply to their criticisms, and argue that, at most, the view that fitness is a statistical propensity is a terminological variant on our thesis that it is a primitive in evolutionary theory.

Scientific arguments often attribute the credit or blame for particular experimental or observational results to fragments of theories rather than to the whole of them. The thesis of Theory and Evidence (Glymour 1980) is that there are structural criteria that account for at least part of the distribution of credit and blame; the book also attempts a tentative formal characterization of one structural criterion. David Christensen (1983) has produced a series of counterexamples which show that the formal characterization is untenable. The question remains whether the failure is due to an oversight in the formal theory or to the falsity of the very idea that there are structural criteria for evidential relevance. Since the counterexamples are uniformly eliminated by a single formal principle, I incline to the first answer.

Some of the controversy surrounding the Duhemian claim that in science falsification is as inconclusive as verification is reconsidered. The D-Thesis, a particular version of this claim first discussed by Adolf Grünbaum, is formulated in a more precise and perspicuous fashion as a conjunction of two subtheses. Grünbaum's attempt to refute one of the subtheses by means of a geometrical counterexample and some subsequent discussions of this example are examined critically. An argument designed to prove the other subthesis is analyzed and shown to be unsuccessful. It is concluded that the D-Thesis is as yet neither proven nor refuted.

Difficulties with the typological concept of species led biologists to reject the “typological” presupposition of an archetype which is manifest in each member of a species. The resulting concept of species, which is here called the phenotypic species concept, is considered as implying that biological species are not real. Modern population thinking has given rise to the concept of a species as a gene-pool. This modern concept is contrasted here with the phenotypic concept in light of some general criteria for evaluating species concepts and is shown to be more satisfactory. Finally, it is held that to ask if a species is real is to ask whether the species grouping arrived at by applying the principles involved in the species concept corresponds with groups of organisms amongst which important biological relationships exist. It is argued that in this sense species, as defined by the gene-pool concept, are certainly real.

We propose that the generalizations of linguistic theory serve to ascribe beliefs to humans. Ordinary speakers would explicitly (and sincerely) deny having these rather esoteric beliefs about language—e.g., the belief that an anaphor must be bound in its governing category. Such ascriptions can also seem problematic in light of certain theoretical considerations having to do with concept possession, revisability, and so on. Nonetheless, we argue that ordinary speakers believe the propositions expressed by certain sentences of linguistic theory, and that linguistics can therefore teach us something about belief as well as language. Rather than insisting that ordinary speakers lack the linguistic beliefs in question, philosophers should try to show how these empirically motivated belief ascriptions can be correct. We argue that Stalnaker's (1984) “pragmatic” account—according to which beliefs are dispositions, and propositions are sets of possible worlds—does just this. Moreover, our construal of explanation in linguistics motivates (and helps provide) responses to two difficulties for the pragmatic account of belief: the phenomenon of opacity, and the so-called problem of deduction.

Basic research or fundamental research is distinct from both pure and applied research, in that it is pure research with expected useful results. The existence of basic or fundamental research is problematic, at least for both inductivists and instrumentalists, but also for Popper. Assuming scientific research to be the search for explanatory conjectures and for refutations, and assuming technology to be the search of conjectures and some corroborations, we can easily place basic or fundamental research between science and technology as a part of their overlap. As a bonus, the present view of basic or fundamental research as an overlap explains the specific hardship basic research workers encounter.

Biologists have as yet taken but little cognizance of the revolution in human thought which has been inaugurated by physicists in the last five years, and philosophers have stressed its negative rather than its positive side.

Inertial frames and Lorentz transformations have a preferred status in the special theory of relativity (STR). Lorentz transformations, in turn, embody Einstein's convention that the velocity of light is isotropic, a convention that is necessary for the establishment of a standard signal synchrony. If the preferred status of Lorentz transformations in STR is not due to some particular bias introduced by a convention on signal synchronism, but to the fact that the Lorentz transformation group is the symmetry group of the theory, then the signal synchronism is not a matter of convention but rather a matter of fact. In order to explore the conventionalist thesis, that within the frame of STR isotropy in the velocity of light and, hence, signal synchronism is a matter of convention, we need a generalized Lorentz transformation group that does not embody Einstein's isotropy convention, and upon which STR can be based. We present here a new approach to the resulting search for a generalized STR, which is well suited for establishing some well-known results of Winnie as well as some new results.

Neuroscience constrains psychology, but stating these constraints with precision is not simple. Here I consider whether mechanistic analysis provides a useful way to integrate models of cognitive and neural structure. Recent evidence suggests that cognitive systems map onto overlapping, distributed networks of brain regions. These highly entangled networks often depart from stereotypical mechanistic behaviors. While this casts doubt on the prospects for classical mechanistic integration of psychology and neuroscience, I argue that it does not impugn a realistic interpretation of either type of model. Cognitive and neural models may depict different, but equally real, causal structures within the mind/brain.

In this paper, I discuss the key role played by Carl G. Hempel's work on theoretical realism and scientific explanation in effecting a crucial philosophical transition between the beginning and the end of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the century, the dominant view was that science is incapable of furnishing explanations of natural phenomena; at the end, explanation is widely viewed as an important, if not the primary, goal of science. In addition to its intellectual benefits, this transition has important practical consequences with respect to dealing with the global problems humans everywhere will face in the twenty-first century.

In the curve fitting problem two conflicting desiderata, simplicity and goodness-of-fit pull in opposite directions. To solve this problem, two proposals, the first one based on Bayes's theorem criterion (BTC) and the second one advocated by Forster and Sober based on Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC) are discussed. We show that AIC, which is frequentist in spirit, is logically equivalent to BTC, provided that a suitable choice of priors is made. We evaluate the charges against Bayesianism and contend that AIC approach has shortcomings. We also discuss the relationship between Schwarz's Bayesian Information Criterion and BTC.

Kim claims that Bechtel and Mundale's case against multiple realization depends on the wrong kind of evidence. The latter argue that neuroscientific practice shows neural states across individuals and species are type identical. Kim replies that the evidence they cite to support this is irrelevant. I defend Bechtel and Mundale by showing why the evidence they cite is relevant and shows multiple realization does not occur.

Theoretical virtues play an important role in the acceptance and belief of theories in science and philosophy. Philosophers have well-developed views on which virtues ought and ought not to influence one’s acceptance and belief. But what do scientists think? This paper presents the results of a quantitative study with scientists from the natural and social sciences and compares their views to those held by philosophers. Some of the more surprising results are: (i) all three groups have a preference order regarding theoretical virtues, making theory choice a much more determinate matter than what has sometimes been suggested; (ii) the preference orders are very similar for the three groups; (iii) simplicity is viewed as an epistemic virtue particularly by social scientists (but not by philosophers); and (iv) syntactic parsimony is preferred to ontological parsimony by all three groups.

Many philosophers argue that the emphasis on commercializing scientific research—and particularly on patenting the results of research—is both epistemically and socially detrimental, in part because it inhibits the flow of information. One of the most important of these criticisms is the “tragedy of the anticommons” thesis. Some have attempted to test this thesis empirically, and many have argued that these empirical tests effectively falsify the thesis. I argue that they neither falsify nor disconfirm the thesis because they do not actually test it. Additionally, I argue that there is other evidence that actually supports the thesis.

In 1966, Richard Levins argued that there are different strategies in model building in population biology. In this paper, I reply to Orzack and Sober's (1993) critiques of Levins and argue that his views on modeling strategies apply also in the context of evolutionary genetics. In particular, I argue that there are different ways in which models are used to ask and answer questions about the dynamics of evolutionary change, prospectively and retrospectively, in classical versus molecular evolutionary genetics. Further, I argue that robustness analysis is a tool for, if not confirmation, then something near enough, in this discipline.