Wesley Salmon has advanced a new model of explanations of particular facts which requires that the explanans contain laws. The laws used in explanations (according to this model) are of the form P(A · C1, B) = p1 ... P(A · Cn, B) = pn. A condition imposed by Salmon on these laws is that the reference classes, i.e. A · C1 ... A · Cn, be homogenous with reference to the property B. A reference class A is homogenous with reference to a property B if every property which determines a place selection with reference to B within A is statistically irrelevant to B in A. It is argued here that the concept of homogeneity cannot in general be satisfied in scientific explanations and that even a weaker requirement, “epistemic homogeneity,” may be too strong.

Definitions can be classified from (at least) two different points of view. We can ask what sort of statements definitions are, how they are to be justified, and what purpose they serve in the process of acquiring scientific knowledge. For lack of a simpler word, let us call a classification of definitions from this point of view epistemological. We can also distinguish different forms of definition; and a classification from this point of view is naturally called formal.

One hears increasingly from philosophers that statistical inference is a technical study that is well in control by statisticians and should be left to them; and one hears, increasingly, from mathematical statisticians that all this talk about interpretations of probability is so much philosophical frosting that is utterly irrelevant to the serious business of producing mathematical statistics. “The more interpretations of probability there are, the wider the scope of applications of our purely mathematical theories.” The point of this paper is to present, in detail, a situation in which an individual with given degrees of belief, given evidence, and given values, will have three different and contrary courses of action recommended to him, each according to one of the three most popular interpretations of probability.

1. Introduction. Cultural relativity is one of the most important conceptions to which anthropology and sociology have devoted much attention in recent years. It is a theory of human conduct based upon observational studies of different cultures and different societies. Many of the leaders in the various social sciences are currently among the advocates of this viewpoint. The burden of these pages, however, is that cultural relativity is flying under false colors: it claims to be empirical but is illogical; it claims to be objective but is surreptitiously moral; it claims to be reasonable but elevates irrationalism; it claims to be scientific but prevents the development of an experimental science of sociocultural conduct. These are serious charges to lodge against leading social scientists; to detail them all would require much more space than is here available. Therefore this paper will be devoted to an incomplete exposition of only two points, namely, that cultural relativity is surreptitiously moral, and, that it deprives man of rational grounds for decision in certain crucial areas. To put the matter bluntly, the advocates of cultural relativity, while they allege themselves to be scientifically amoral, sneak in through the back door a peculiarly crude form of ethnocentric morality which is clearly contrary to the observable facts of human behavior; and, while presenting a presumably scientific analysis of human conduct, leave us only with personal taste as the basis for making certain important decisions.

2. Cultural Relativity Defined. Cultural relativity, briefly stated, asserts that any set of customs and institutions, or way of life, is as valid as any other. It may be well to let some representative cultural relativists speak for themselves at this point, in order to show that the summary statement of their position, just given, is correct. The author of an excellent and widely adopted textbook in cultural anthropology stresses the dignity inherent in every body of custom, and abjures us to be tolerant of the ways of other people:

… cultural relativism is a philosophy which … lays stress on the dignity inherent in every body of custom, and on the need for tolerance of conventions though they may differ from one's own … the relativistic point of view brings into relief the validity of every set of norms for those people whose lives are guided by them, and the values these represent. … The very core of cultural relativism is the social discipline that comes of respect for differences—of mutual respect. Emphasis on the worth of many ways of life, not one, is an affirmation of the values of each culture. Such emphasis seeks to understand and to harmonize goals, not to judge and destroy those that do not dovetail with our own, (4, pp. 76–77).

Though some doubts about the principle that every proposition is either true or false were entertained even by Aristotle, both the number and the vigor of criticisms of this principle have been increasing in recent years. This paper attempts a restatement and a re-examination of the issues involved in this dispute, and in particular an evaluation of the effects on the argument of such recent discoveries as that of the “many-valued logics.”

Despite his well-known deductivism, in his early (unpublished) writings, Popper held an inductivist position. Up to 1929 epistemology entered Popper's reflections only as far as the problem was that of the justification of the scientific character of these fields of research. However, in that year, while surveying the history of non-Euclidean geometries, Popper explicitly discussed the cognitive status of geometry without referring to psycho-pedagogical aspects, thus turning from cognitive psychology to the logic and methodology of science. As a consequence of his reflections on the problematic relationship between geometrical-mathematical constructions and physical reality Popper was able to get over a too direct notion of such a relationship, cast doubts on inductive inference and started conceiving in a new (strictly non-inductivist) manner the relationship between theoretical and observational propositions.

Experimenters sometimes insist that it is unwise to examine data before determining how to analyze them, as it creates the potential for biased results. I explore the rationale behind this methodological guideline from the standpoint of an error statistical theory of evidence, and I discuss a method of evaluating evidence in some contexts when this predesignation rule has been violated. I illustrate the problem of potential bias, and the method by which it may be addressed, with an example from the search for the top quark. A point in favor of the error statistical theory is its ability, demonstrated here, to explicate such methodological problems and suggest solutions, within the framework of an objective theory of evidence.

Algorithmic information theory gives an idealized notion of compressibility that is often presented as an objective measure of simplicity. It is suggested at times that Solomonoff prediction, or algorithmic information theory in a predictive setting, can deliver an argument to justify Occam’s razor. This article explicates the relevant argument and, by converting it into a Bayesian framework, reveals why it has no such justificatory force. The supposed simplicity concept is better perceived as a specific inductive assumption, the assumption of effectiveness. It is this assumption that is the characterizing element of Solomonoff prediction and wherein its philosophical interest lies.

Living fossils, taxa with similar members now and in the deep past, have recently come under scrutiny. Those who think the concept should be retained have argued for its epistemic and normative utility. This article extends the epistemic utility of the living fossils concept to include ways in which a taxon’s living fossil status can serve as evidence for other claims about that taxon. I will use insights from developmental biology to refine these claims. Insofar as these considerations demonstrate the epistemic utility of the living fossils concept, they support retaining the concept and using it in biological research.

In this paper I examine Albert's (2000) claim that the low entropy state of the early universe is sufficient to explain irreversible thermodynamic phenomena. In particular, I argue that conditionalizing on the initial state of the universe does not have the explanatory power it is presumed to have. I present several arguments to the effect that Albert's ‘past hypothesis’ alone cannot justify the belief in past nonequilibrium conditions or ground the veracity of records of the past.

Standard applications of evolutionary game theory look at a single game and focus on the evolution of behavior for that game alone. Instead, this article uses tools from evolutionary game theory to study the competition between choice mechanisms in a rich and variable multigame environment. A choice mechanism is a way of subjectively representing a decision situation, paired with a method for choosing an act based on this subjective representation. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach by a case study that shows how subjective representations in terms of regret that differ from the actual fitness can be evolutionarily advantageous.

Researchers often pursue proof of concept research, but criteria for evaluating such research remain poorly specified. This article proposes a general framework for proof of concept research that knits together and augments earlier discussions. The framework includes prototypes, proof of concept demonstrations, and post facto demonstrations. With a case from theoretical evolutionary genetics, the article illustrates the general framework and articulates some of the reasoning strategies used within that field. This article provides both specific tools with which to understand how researchers evaluate models in theoretical evolutionary genetics and general tools that apply to proof of concept research more generally.

Owens (1993) argues that a tension exists between our commonsense view of mental states and the scientific view that psychological explanations not contradict supervenience. He suggests that one cannot accept the anti-individualistic conclusions of Twin-Earth thought experiments and continue to use folk psychological states to explain behavior. I argue that his conclusions are based on individuating content widely and causal powers narrowly, and that such individuation violates consistency assumptions about the terms of his discussion. Thus, I argue, the tension he points to evaporates when we adopt either a consistently wide view or a consistently narrow view.

Thesis : Art like science radically affects our perceiving and thinking, and the two are substantially alike in that together—along with an inherited “natural” language system with which they overlap—they enable us to articulate the world.

Science has been advanced as the measure of all things: scientific realism. By implication, art pertains to beauty, science truth. Science effects conceptual breakthroughs, changes our models of natural order. On the contrary (I argue), as a nonverbal symbol system art similarly affects paradigm-induced expectations. Substantively there is no difference in the way each enables us to articulate or measure the world : symbolic realism.

The myth of resemblance as a criterion of representation—imitation as a one-one relation—has, at least since the time of Plato, obscured this truth. Once the distinction between representational and nonrepresentational art falls, the true nature of artist (like scientist) as maker is illumined. The artist, the scientist (disciplinarian), the cosmologist (those responsible for the formulation of so-called natural languages—in time all of us) make the world or, what practically amounts to the same thing, the known, perceived world. This is the claim of the symbolic realist. Is symbolic realism itself only a watershed ? What implication does this critique have for assessing the role of the philosopher today?

A special merit of Professor Feigl's stimulating essay lies in the clarity with which he draws the issue between phenomenalistic and realistic interpretations of science as one concerned entirely with the evaluation of their relative adequacy as analytic reconstructions of empirical knowledge. Responsible and fruitful discussion of these interpretations cannot therefore be a debate over the truth or falsity of scientific theories. For as he carefully notes, the differences between these alternative analyses are not “pragmatic differences” of the ordinary sort, since no differences in regard to any observable consequences that could weigh for or against a scientific theory can be associated with them. Feigl's own rejection of phenomenalism and his espousal of semantic realism must in consequence also be judged in terms of the standard he himself has recognized as alone relevant in this discussion.

According to Mohan Matthen and Edwin Levy, certain immunological processes require explanations in which the immune system is attributed intentional states. This, they think, strengthens the scientific credentials of intentional psychology and undermines the position of those who argue that the scientific treatment of human action should involve the elimination of intentional description. In this paper, I argue that immunology does not and need not employ intentional explanation or description and consequently has nothing to offer those who seek to defend the scientific standing of intentional psychology by looking for other disciplines that “accommodate the intentional”.

In a survey of information theory and some of its implications, Warren Weaver has proposed a distinction between engineering (or channel) noise and semantic noise (1: 94–117). Ordinary Spanish usage reflects this distinction quite neatly. If A speaks to B and B responds with no entiendo, it means ‘I have not heard your words, because of interfering sound or lack of attention; please transmit the same message again’; if he responds with no comprendo, it means ‘I heard you all right, but what I heard doesn't make sense; please paraphrase or explain.’ Channel noise, thus, is the responsible factor when that which leaves a transmitter is not that which reaches the receiver; semantic noise is a discrepancy between the codes used by transmitter and receiver.

Alexander Rosenberg (1994) claims that the omniscient viewpoint of the evolutionary process would have no need for the concept of random drift. However, his argument fails to take into account all of the processes which are considered to be instances of random drift. A consideration of these processes shows that random drift is not eliminable even given a position of omniscience. Furthermore, Rosenberg must take these processes into account in order to support his claims that evolution is deterministic and that evolutionary biology is an instrumental science.

It has always been the ideal of science to discover laws of nature on which we can all agree. Agreement requires evidence independent of individual judgment, i.e., objective evidence. We apply the term objective to such unbiased scientific evidence because we associate it with an external world of objects that we conceive to be the origin of our information. This external world is instinctively invented by each of us as a means of dealing with invariant patterns in his private world of experience. The invention is validated and elaborated as a consequence of the fact that it turns out to be sharable. In fact the common content of all our invented external worlds is so unambiguous and independent of individual bias that it can form the universally accepted basis for communication and action in an organized society. The consistency of the patterns of experience associated with the external world is such that we are under severe psychological compulsion to assign to this world an existence independent of our experience and a reality superior to that of any small part of our experience. Physical science is devoted to the study of the “laws” of the external physical universe, i.e., to the behaviour of the objects in it. Hence there is a strong tendency to project into the external world the information gathered by scientifically objective methods and even the theoretical concepts in terms of which the information is interpreted. Whatever is so projected is objective in a second sense of the term, i.e., assigned by us to the external world of objects.

Following the general program, outlined in a previous paper on the Foundations of Mathematical Biophysics, we shall outline some physico-mathematical aspects of the Gestalt-problem. Faithful to the principles laid down before, we shall not attempt to give a theory of such and such psycho-physiological phenomena connected with our problem, but we shall investigate in a preliminary way the abstract conceptual basis, which must underlie the construction of any concrete theory. To make our aim quite clear and to avoid at the same time unnecessary repetition, we refer the reader to our previous paper. Furthermore we shall give here only an outline of the physico-mathematical aspects; and of necessity we must leave a number of details untouched and unanswered.