Preface to the 90th Anniversary Issue of Philosophy of Science

James Owen Weatherall, Editor-in-Chief

Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of California, Irvine

The first issue of Philosophy of Science was published in January 1934.  The journal was founded – and, apparently, funded – by William Marias Malisoff, a 38-year-old biochemist of independent means who maintained serious interests in a broad range of subjects, including physics, mathematics, and philosophy.  Malisoff had emigrated to the United States from modern-day Ukraine – at that time, Russia – as a child.  He held three degrees from Columbia, but his PhD, in biochemistry, was ultimately from NYU.  After finishing the PhD he held teaching positions at various institutions in the mid-Atlantic region, spending about a decade as Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania before taking a similar role at Brooklyn Polytechnic. Towards the end of his career, he was affiliated with the Essex School of Medicine.  He died, suddenly and unexpectedly, in November 1947, at the age of 52.  He edited the journal up until his death (Frank and Churchman 1948; Churchman 1984).

Malisoff was a colorful figure.  Among other distinctions, he was the author of a book called The Span of Life (1937), which presented a vision for a new science of life extension and, eventually, immortality.  Later in life he was the Director of an organization called the Longevity Research Institute.  He was also identified by U.S. counterintelligence operatives as a prolific and effective Soviet spy immediately before and during World War II.  The information he passed to the Soviet Union was apparently connected to his technical expertise in chemistry, and especially to petroleum.  Decrypted transmissions intercepted by the famous Venona Project (which also identified Klaus Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, and the Cambridge Five among others) revealed that he had a falling out with his Soviet handlers before the end of the war.  The conflict arose when he began to demand large payments, which he apparently wanted to fund a manufacturing venture he was trying to launch (Reisch 2005, Ch. 5).

Within philosophy of science, Malisoff was firmly committed to the Unity of Science program. He appears to have conceived of the journal in part as a vehicle for advancing that project (Malisoff 1934).  He was well connected with philosophers of science in the U.S. and in Europe, and the original Editorial Board of the journal included international luminaries such as Susan Stebbing, Herbert Feigl, and Rudolf Carnap, the last of whom was still based in Vienna in 1934.  Carnap and Feigl, as well as other Editorial Board members, such as Henry Margenau, Eric Temple Bell, and Malisoff himself, published articles in the inaugural issue, with Carnap’s contribution translated by Malisoff. 

From the first issue, the journal’s inside cover described it as an “organ of the Philosophy of Science Association”; likewise, an announcement of the new journal in the pages of The Journal of Philosophy in December 1933 (30(25): 700) advertised the journal as the “chief external expression” of the Philosophy of Science Association.  But as the journal’s second Editor-in-Chief, C. West Churchman, would later explain, no such organization existed.  There were no bylaws, no formal organizational structure or legal status, no leadership, and no activities organized by the PSA aside from the journal itself.  This would change only in December 1947, a month after Malisoff died, when Churchman, Philipp Frank, and T. A. Cowan drafted bylaws and elected officers so that there could be some formal body to decide on Malisoff’s successor (Churchman 1984).  Frank became the first President of the PSA, in 1948; Churchman was its first Secretary.

Churchman was in many ways a fitting heir to Malisoff.  A philosophy undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania when the journal was originally founded – this is where he met Malisoff – Churchman received a PhD in philosophy and eventually became the Philosophy Department Chair at Penn, the position he held when he took over the journal in 1947.  But then in 1951, he effectively left professional philosophy.  He resigned from Penn and became Professor of Engineering Administration at Case Institute of Technology and then Professor of Business Administration at Berkeley.  He is arguably best known today for his contributions to operations research, systems engineering, and management science, though he continued to edit Philosophy of Science for a decade, well into his transition to the new field.  The editors following Churchman were his former student, Richard Rudner (1959-1975), then Kenneth Shaffner (1976-1980), Robert Butts (1981-1990), Merilee Salmon (1991-1995), Philip Kitcher (1996-1999), Noretta Koertge (2000-2004), Michael Dickson (2004-2009), Jeffrey Barrett (2009-2017), and Andrea Woody (2017-2022).  I took over effective January 1, 2023.

The present volume contains a sampling of 30 articles from the nine decades of Philosophy of Science, collected to commemorate the upcoming 90th anniversary of the first issue.  There are three or four articles from each decade, with a larger number from the more recent decades.  The goal was to exhibit some of the best and most significant work the journal has published over the years, in a way that was sensitive to changes in the journal’s editorial vision and the field of philosophy of science during that time.  There was no simple metric by which to rank articles in a way that would capture the texture of this history, so instead of attempting a formulaic approach, Managing Editor Margaret Farrell and I decided to implement a process that would draw on the collective expertise, wisdom, and judgment of the journal’s current editorial staff and advisors.  The articles that follow were not chosen by any objective process, such as citation factors or page rank algorithms; but they also should not be viewed as reflecting any individual’s judgments about importance or quality.  They are the result of a process and should be understood as such.

To assemble the present special issue, I reviewed the top cited articles – according to Google Scholar – from each decade that the journal has published.  From these I compiled a draft list of six or seven articles from each decade.  Citations were one important consideration in compiling the lists, but not the only consideration.  I looked for articles that were especially influential or of special historical significance within philosophy of science, for articles that were surprising – Philosophy of Science published that!? – and for articles that reflected the full intellectual range of the journal’s publication history.  This initial step was an attempt at a holistic look at the journal’s history.  I then shared my draft list with the Associate Editors and Managing Editor, along with the Google Scholar data I had used to compile the lists, for feedback and advice.  I received very valuable recommendations at this stage, leading to many changes in the draft list.  What resulted was very close to a consensus document.

In the final step, I asked the entire Editorial Board, including the Associate Editors, to vote on which articles to include in the issue.  Although I explained how the lists were constructed, my request to the Editorial Board was to rank the articles based on their own best sense of what should be included, not on any particular criteria from me.  We used a Borda count to rank the articles within each decade.  Originally, I intended to include three articles from each decade.  But when the votes came in, I was struck by how much closer the results from the three most recent decades were than those from earlier decades—presumably because there is more uncertainty about what the lasting influence of recent articles will be.  In light of this, I decided to include four articles from the three most recent decades and three each from the first six decades. 

The final list reflects the top vote-earners from the Editorial Board vote (presented in no particular order), with only the following modifications: following the sage advice of several Associate Editors and Board members, I decided that any given author could appear in the issue only once, and so I made some small adjustments to make that so.  (Three authors would otherwise have appeared twice: Robert Merton, Rudolf Carnap, and Philip Kitcher.  Lindley Darden also appeared on the ballot twice, though one of her two pieces was narrowly excluded in the vote.)

The issue shows several different ways in which an article can be influential.  For instance, it contains many highly-cited and frequently-taught classics – articles such as Carnap’s “Testability and Meaning”, Hempel and Oppenheim’s “Studies in the Logic of Explanation”, Schaffner’s “Approaches to Reduction”, Kitcher’s “Explanatory Unification”, Laudan’s “A Confutation of Convergent Realism”, and Stalnaker’s “Probability and Conditionals” – that are undoubtedly highly influential and important, but also reflect views that seem to be used more often as foils than as ones to endorse and extend.  To put the point another way, we can see in this list how many of the “received views” of core philosophy of science were first defended in the pages of this journal.  On the other hand, we also see articles in the volume whose lasting influence is of a different character.  Given the explosion of interest in the role of values in science over the past several decades, it is striking that both Rudner’s “The Scientist Qua Scientist Makes Value Judgments”, which continues to inspire and inform work in this field, and Richard Jeffrey’s powerful reply to Rudner, “Valuation and Acceptance of Scientific Hypotheses”, made the list.  Likewise, it is striking that Millikan’s “In Defense of Proper Functions”, a locus classicus for teleosemantics, appeared in the journal; as did Karen Neander’s “Functions as Selected Effects: The Conceptual Analyst's Defense”, a reply to Millikan that also continues to inspire an enormous amount of work on functions in biology and cognition.  So, too, with Craver, Machamer, and Darden’s, “Thinking About Mechanisms”, which launched two decades of work on the “new mechanist” philosophy.

There are also some notable omissions.  It is regrettable, for instance, that no work from Mary Hesse, the first woman elected President of the PSA, appears.  Likewise, while some prominent early figures – Carnap, Hempel – do appear, others, such as Reichenbach and Feigl, whom one might have expected to be represented here, did not publish anything in the journal whose influence compared with the selected articles. Susan Stebbing, W. V. O. Quine, Hilary Putnam, Thomas Kuhn, Patrick Suppes, Mario Bunge, Adolf Grünbaum, and Wesley Salmon are other towering figures whom one might have expected to appear but do not.  Some senior contemporary figures whose influence cannot be questioned are also missing: consider, for instance, Hempel Award winners Bas van Fraassen and Brian Skyrms, or other giants, such as Helen Longino, Daniel Dennett, Patricia Churchland, and Bill Wimsatt, to name just a few.  (Bunge, Salmon, and van Fraassen did appear on the list of papers circulated, but those papers did not win out in their respective decades.  Papers by Suppes, Hesse, and Longino were discussed among the Associate Editors, but were not chosen for the ballot.)  In almost all of these cases, the explanation is simple: while many of these authors did publish in Philosophy of Science, the work for which they are best known and which has been most influential happened to appear elsewhere.  Very often these authors are best known for their books. 

Something similar can be said for several subfields.  For instance, there are no articles in core feminist philosophy of science on the list.  Indeed, there were none on the ballot sent to the Editorial Board, and virtually none on the lists of highly cited articles from the journal that the Associate Editors and I consulted.  Surprised by this, I went back and looked carefully through past journal issues, and also checked where influential feminist philosophers of science had published their work.  I found it was rarely in Philosophy of Science, and when it was, the topics tended to have little to do with feminist philosophy. Similarly, almost no work on the philosophy of quantum theory – none at all on the measurement problem – made it onto the ballot, because virtually no work on that topic appeared among the mostly highly cited articles published in the journal.  There is only one paper on realism, one on reduction and inter-theoretic relations, and one on causation.  Nothing in philosophy of chemistry appears, nor does anything in philosophy of measurement or experimentation.

All of these omissions ultimately reflect the task we set for ourselves.  The goal was not to select the most important and influential work in the field of philosophy of science.  It was to identify a representative and interesting cross-section of that work that was published, as research articles, in Philosophy of Science.  The result reflects the history of the journal, not the field as a whole.   On the other hand, the Associate Editors and I certainly did use our own judgment about what was interesting, relevant, and exciting to select among the highly cited papers in the journal.  There is no doubt that a different group of philosophers of science would have come up with a different list.

In constructing the original lists of articles, two things struck me about the history of the journal.  The first was a notable change over time in what sort of work was published—or at least, of the work published, what sort of work proved most influential.  In the early years, the journal regularly published important philosophical and conceptual works by very prominent working scientists. In addition to Albert Einstein and the biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, whose articles appear in the issue, the journal published influential work by the biologist R. A. Fisher, physicist Niels Bohr, mathematician Norbert Wiener, and anthropologist Edward Sapir, among many others.  Some of the papers these scientists published in the journal were among their most important works, including the classic “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology,” by Arturo Rosenbleuth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow, which is widely seen to have inaugurated the field of cybernetics.  (Although this article was on the ballot sent to the Editorial Board, it was not selected for the issue, perhaps because its significant influence is primarily outside of philosophy.)   The journal’s early Advisory Board also included prominent scientists, including, for instance, the physicist Eugene Wigner and economist Karl Polanyi.  Professional philosophers were certainly represented, but the journal was broadly interdisciplinary.

Over time, though, a distinct shift occurred, so that by the 1960s, a much greater proportion of the work that appeared in the journal was written by professional philosophers of science.  More, those authors increasingly wrote for an intended audience of other philosophers of science.  A new discipline had emerged, with its own community, norms, and problems.  This led to several advantages, such as clearly defined problems on which definite progress could be made over time.  But one also gets an impression of growing insularity, as working scientists engaged less and less with the journal. It is interesting that the close engagement and collaboration with scientists and scientific practice that many contemporary philosophers of science worry is missing from the field today was commonplace in the early years of the journal. (That is not to say that science has dropped out of the journal entirely—and recent decades include some important papers by scientists, such as John Maynard Smith’s “The Concept of Information in Biology”, which appears in this issue.) 

A second observation concerns a common folk history of the field, which is that philosophy of science was initially dominated by ideas drawn from physics and remained that way for many years.  On this account, it was only in the final decades of the twentieth century, beginning perhaps in the 1970s, that philosophers of science began to draw on examples from biology, and then from other fields, such as chemistry, economics, climate science, and so on. 

This common picture of the field’s evolution does not appear to be reflected in the publication history of Philosophy of Science. I did not attempt to classify all of the articles published in the journal or to exhaustively measure the relative fraction of papers published in different subfields over time, and it is entirely possible that doing so would reveal a historical bias towards physics.  Still, reviewing the most highly cited papers from each decade makes clear that from the very beginning, Philosophy of Science has regularly published high quality and ultimately influential papers in philosophy of biology, philosophy of the social sciences, and other subfields.  The early composition of the Editorial Board and Advisory Board also reflect this intellectual range—as do the broad interests of the early editors.  Indeed, though Malisoff himself is difficult to classify, arguably the first philosopher of (modern) physics to serve as Editor-in-Chief was Michael Dickson, beginning only in 2004.  This is purely speculative on my part, but I suspect the folk history originates more from the examples chosen by widely anthologized figures, such as Carnap, Reichenbach, and Kuhn, and the strong personalities of mid-century philosophers of physics, than lack of interest in other areas of science among early professional philosophers of science.

To mark the 10th anniversary of the journal, Malisoff published an editorial in the January 1944 issue of Philosophy of Science (Malisoff 1944).   In it, he expressed regret about the quality of the journal to that point.  “It must be admitted,” he wrote, “that our record on the whole has been highly unsatisfactory. … Too many of the papers that got in are just barely intelligible”.  He begged prospective authors to write with directness and clarity, and to “avoid heavy trade jargon of certain schools of philosophy which survive annihilation by sound fact and theory by throwing up the barriers of a ‘secret language’”. Highly technical material would be fine, even encouraged, he said, especially in cases when it was necessary to introduce new “hybrid sciences” that do not yet have their own publication venues.  But such material must be accompanied by “simple expository text” that offers “a simple tale to the layman” (2).

From the perspective of 80 years later, my own assessment of the first decade of the journal is more like that of Churchman, who in 1984 reported that he was “impressed by the high quality of scholarship and creativity” in its first dozen years (Churchman 1984, p. 21).  The journal certainly published work of lasting importance in that decade.  But I am even more struck by the uniformity of stylistic vision.  The journal still aims for clarity and directness, and while it welcomes technical material, it must be clearly exposited and accessible to whatever extent possible. 

Judging from Malisoff and Churchman’s experience, it is easier today than it was at the beginning to publish excellent work meeting these requirements in the journal, as the field is now large, active, and highly professional.  There is an overabundance of first-rate work to choose from.  There are also new trends in our submissions, such as a rapid rise in work on the philosophy of machine learning and artificial intelligence that, at its best, emblemizes Malisoff’s vision of “hybrid science”.  It is an exciting time.  I am certain that a decade from now, as we reflect on the final decade of the journal’s first century, there will be work in the journal that deserves to stand beside the best work in its first 90 years.

References

Churchman, C. West. 1984. “Early Years of the Philosophy of Science Association.” Philosophy of Science 51(1): 20–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/18... 

Frank, Philip, and C. West Churchman. 1948. “In Memoriam: Dr. William M. Malisoff.” Philosophy of Science 15(1): 1–3. http://www.jstor.org/stable/185193.

Malisoff, William M. 1934. “Editorial: What Is Philosophy of Science?” Philosophy of Science 1(1): 1–4. http://www.jstor.org/stable/184478.

Malisoff, William M. 1937. The Span of Life. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott.

Malisoff, William M. 1944. “Editorial: Philosophy of Science after Ten Years.” Philosophy of Science 11(1): 1–2. http://www.jstor.org/stable/184885.

Reisch, George A. 2005. How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.