In this paper, I will defend Paul Feyerabend's claim—that there are some scientific theories that cannot be refuted unless one of their rivals is first confirmed—by criticizing Ronald Laymon's well-known attack on Feyerabend's claim. In particular, I will argue both that the Second Law of Thermodynamics was not refuted before the Kinetic Theory's predictions were confirmed, and that it could not have been refuted without the confirmation of the remarkable predictions of some rival theory.

Taxonomies of living things and the methods used to produce them changed little with the institutionalization of evolutionary thinking in biology. Instead, the relationships expressed in existing taxonomies were merely reinterpreted as the result of evolution, and evolutionary concepts were developed to justify existing methods. I argue that the delay of the Darwinian Revolution in biological taxonomy has resulted partly from a failure to distinguish between two fundamentally different ways of ordering identified by Griffiths (1974): classification and systematization. Classification consists of ordering entities into classes, groups defined by the attributes of their members; in contrast, systematization consists of ordering entities into systems, more inclusive entities whose existence depends on some natural process through which their parts are related. Evolutionary, or phylogenetic, systematics takes evolutionary descent to be the natural process of interest in biological taxonomy. I outline a general framework for a truly phylogenetic systematics and examine some of its consequences.

It is argued that Galileo's theory of justification was a version of explanationism. Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems is to be read as primarily a defense of his theory of the tides. He shows how, by assuming Copernican motions, he can explain the tides, thereby justifying the endorsement of Copernicus. The crux of the argument rests on Galileo's account of explanation, which is novel in its reliance on the use of geometry. Finally, the consequences of his use of geometry, and his views on the limits of knowledge, force us to conclude that if Galileo was a realist, his realism was so highly constrained as to be irrelevant.

D. M. Armstrong, Michael Tooley, and Fred Dretske have recently proposed a new realist account of laws of nature, according to which laws of nature are objective relations between universals. After criticizing this account, I develop an alternative realist account, according to which (1) the nomic structure of a world is a relation between initial world-histories and world-histories, and (2) a law of nature is a fact that holds solely in virtue of nomic structure (and not, for example, in virtue of past history).

Traditionally, forces are causes of a special sort. Forces have been conceived to be the direct or immediate causes of things. Other sorts of causes act indirectly by producing forces which are transmitted in various ways to produce various effects. However, forces are supposed to act directly without the mediation of anything else.

But forces, so conceived, appear to be occult. They are mysterious, because we have no clear conception of what they are, as opposed to what they are postulated to do; and they seem to be hidden from direct observations. There is, therefore, strong initial motivation for trying to eliminate forces from physics. Furthermore, as we shall explain, powerful arguments can be mounted to show that theories with forces can always be recast as theories without them. Hence it seems that forces should be eliminated, in the interests of simplicity.

We argue, however, that forces should not be eliminated—just differently construed. For the effect of elimination is to leave us without any adequate account of the causal relationships forces were postulated to explain. And this would remain the case, even if forces could be identified with some merely dispositional properties of physical systems. In our view, forces are species of the causal relation itself, and as such have a different ontological status from the sorts of entities normally considered to be related as causes to effects.

In this paper I argue against Sober's claim that natural selection does not explain the traits of individuals. Sober argues that natural selection only explains the distribution of traits in a population. My point is that the explanation of an individual's traits involves us in a description of the individual's ancestry, and in an explanation of the distribution of traits in that ancestral population. Thus Sober is wrong, natural selection is part of the explanation of the traits of individuals.

I argue that post-Kuhnian approaches to rational scientific change fail to appreciate several distinct philosophical requirements and relativist challenges that have been assumed to be, and may in fact be essential to any adequate conception of scientific rationality. These separate requirements and relativist challenges are clearly distinguished and motivated. My argument then focuses on Shapere's view that there are typically good reasons for scientific change. I argue: (1) that contrary to his central aim, his account of good reasons ultimately presupposes the requirement of universal standards of scientific reasoning; (2) that the good reasons established by his account underdetermine the rationality of scientific change and allow that other changes would have been equally or even more rational; (3) that as a result, Shapere's approach fails to meet what I characterize as the challenges of moderate, sociological, and cognitive relativism.

In her “Species Are Individuals” (1985), Mary Williams offers informal arguments and a sketched proof which allegedly show that species are individuals with respect to evolutionary theory. In this paper, I suggest that her informal arguments are insufficient for showing that clans are not sets and that species are individuals. I also argue that her sketched proof depends on three questionable assumptions.

This paper is a critical discussion of a recent article by Bas van Fraassen (1985) in which he suggests the following view: we should admit that we have no explanation of the EPR correlations, but refuse to consider the correlations as mysterious nevertheless (pp. 126–128). We shall focus on just three of the claims made by van Fraassen in support of this view. The three claims are these:

1. (1) The EPR correlations cannot be explained by signals being transmitted from one component of an EPR compound to the other (pp. 114–115).

2. (2) There is, in the EPR situation, no empirically verifiable action at a distance (pp. 124–126).

3. (3) The demand for an explanation of the EPR correlations is similar to the Aristotelian demand of the post-Newtonian proponents of the law of inertia to explain what keeps a body moving if there are no forces impressed on it (pp. 126–128).

The chief objections raised by Doppelt (this issue, “The Philosophical Requirements for an Adequate Conception of Scientific Rationality“) against my views fall into three groups: ones having to do with my concept of “success” (that I have provided no analysis of it, and that therefore my concept of “reason“ in science is likewise unexplained; that it requires appeal to some universal criterion); ones having to do with the role of standards or criteria in science (how they are related to substantive beliefs; the possibility of rejecting them); and ones purporting to show that I have not escaped relativism (underdetermination of beliefs; problem of loss in scientific change). I reply to each of these groups of criticisms in turn, concluding with some remarks on the status and validity of the requirements he lays down for any account of scientific rationality.

Classic studies of explanation, such as those of Hempel and Bromberger, took it for granted that an explanation-seeking question of the form “Why P?“ should be understood as asking about the proposition P. This view has been recently challenged by Bas van Fraassen and Alan Garfinkel. They acknowledge that some questions have the surface form “Why P?” but they hold that a correct reading for why-questions should take the form “Why P (rather than Q)?”, where Q is a contrasting alternative. This contrast theory is discussed here. It is argued that, properly understood, the contrast theory and the propositional approach can and should give equivalent readings to why-questions.

Are probabilism and special relativity compatible? Dieks argues that they are. But the possible universe he specifies, designed to exemplify both probabilism and special relativity, either incorporates a universal “now” (and is thus incompatible with special relativity), or amounts to a many world universe (which I have discussed, and rejected as too ad hoc to be taken seriously), or fails to have any one definite overall Minkowskian-type space-time structure (and thus differs drastically from special relativity as ordinarily understood). Probabilism and special relativity appear to be incompatible after all. What is at issue is not whether “the flow of time” can be reconciled with special relativity, but rather whether explicitly probabilistic versions of quantum theory should be rejected because of incompatibility with special relativity.

Harvey Siegel's (1985) attempts to revive the traditional epistemological formulation of the rationality of science. Contending that “a general commitment to evidence” is constitutive of method and rationality in science, Siegel advances its compatibility with specific, historically attuned formulations of principles of evidential support as a virtue of his aprioristic candidate for science's rationality. In point of fact, this account is compatible with virtually any formulation of evidential support, which runs afoul of Siegel's claim that scientific beliefs must be evaluated with respect to their rationality. The unwelcome consequence of Siegel's view is that most any belief, scientific or pseudoscientific, can be defended as rational. Indeed, if we want to furnish a warrant for rational choice, we must turn to the very historically informed principles of evidential support that are dismissed by Siegel as providing a misleading portrait of science's rationality.

In the introduction to Probabilistic Metaphysics (1984), Patrick Suppes declares his intention to refute each of five central tenets of “neotraditional metaphysics”. These tenets run as follows:

1. (1) The future is determined by the past.

2. (2) Every event has a sufficient determinant cause.

3. (3) Knowledge must be grounded in certainty.

4. (4) Scientific knowledge can in principle be made complete.

5. (5) Scientific knowledge and method can in principle be unified.

In his (1988), Brian Baigrie criticizes my earlier discussion of the rationality of science (Siegel 1985). In this response, I argue that (1) Baigrie misses the point of my tripartite distinction between different questions one can ask about science's rationality, (2) Baigrie's argument that the history of the development of methodological principles is crucial to philosophical discussion of the rationality of science is flawed, and (3) Baigrie's charge that my view is “anemic” rests on a failure to appreciate the point of my tripartite distinction.