In the world of academic specialties and subspecialties, philosophy of biology certainly counts as a self-respecting, if not otherwise respected, field of study. It has its own exemplary works, its own lines of communication, etc. In this regard, philosophy of biology might be compared with philosophy of physics.

What is the structure of evolutionary theory? The question seems to presuppose a unique right answer. But the relevant notion of structure is highly relative to broad philosophic theories about scientific theories. At present no one such theory dominates. One once did. It went by the name ‘Logical Positivism’. During its heyday a unique right answer to our question might have been expected. There is no reason to expect one now.

Not only should one not suppose that there is a uniquely correct structural description of evolutionary theory, neither should one suppose that giving a structural description of evolutionary theory is essentially uncovering what is implicit in biological work. That approach is appropriate only when conceptual fossilization has occurred. In the case of evolutionary theory molding is more appropriate than uncovering.

The “Code of Ethics” formulated by the Engineer's Council for Professional Development—and adopted by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers— claims that “engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public in the performance of their professional duties… . [Moreover,] should the Engineers’ professional judgment be overruled under circumstances where the safety, health, and welfare of the public are endangered, the Engineers shall inform their clients or employers of the possible consequences and notify other proper authority of the situation, as may be appropriate.“ The other major engineering societies endorse “Codes of Ethics” with a similar provision.

One of the most interesting and influential views in Aristotle's work is his distinction between the practical life and the contemplative life. The division is based on two important claims. The first is a philosophical psychology which involves a hierarchy of human faculties, the highest of which is the intellect. The second is a distinction between two kinds of human doing. One sort of doing is essentially aimed at ends for the sake of which it is undertaken and the other is a doing pursued for its own sake, merely as an exercise of appropriate faculties, skills, or capacities. The hierarchy of faculties and division of human doings grounds Aristotle's view that the exercise of intellect, what he calls “contemplation”, is the highest form of human activity.

Almost everyone agrees that new technologies frequently have profound effects upon how we live as individuals, as groups, and as societies. As one author puts it: “One of the most persistent themes in the social sciences, history, and the humanities is the impact of technology and technological change on all aspects of social life.” (Merrill 1968, p. 576). Technology has come to be a central concern in much public debate on such issues as nuclear power, industrial and automobile pollution, transportation systems, energy, and military hardware.

Always bearing in mind Francis Bacon's claim that knowledge is power, we develop and employ technology for a variety of economic and social reasons. Moreover, technology is “people-embodied”, engineers being the principal agents of technological innovation and, thus, social change.

I begin this paper by surveying the kinds of questions that arise in the emerging field of Technology and Society Studies. This survey leads me to ask if the area of value theory is sufficiently well-developed to sustain intelligent and critical discussion of the value issues in this field. I note that philosophers have had little to say about the kinds of value questions that arise and, in the remainder of the paper, I argue that what little there is has often got off on the wrong foot — either because of assumptions that are wrong-headed or because the approach is question-begging for some of the central value issues.

While the field of Technology and Society Studies is as yet rather ill-defined, a perusal of the literature and the course descriptions suggests the categorization that follows.

In concluding their major survey, “Quantum Logics,” Greechie and Gudder (1975) listed four outstanding directions for future research, the last of which was, “Explain the meaning of the word ‘logic’ in the title of this paper.” Broadly speaking, there are two radically different points of view on this. There is the view that, taken strictly, ‘logic’ is a misnomer: quantum logic studies certain algebraic structures naturally arising from the formal, apparatus of quantum theory, structures which may afford insights into quantum physics, on a number of levels, but which do not in any way involve giving up or replacing classical logical laws. (Cf., e.g., Jauch (1968, p. 77).) In contrast, there is the view that the non-Boolean structures arising from the Hilbert space formalism should be taken as giving rise to a genuine non-classical logic, in conflict with classical logic, but appropriate to the description of quantum mechanical reality.

It has been argued, most notably by Putnam (1969, 1974) that socalled quantum logic (which we shall often refer to as. orthomodular logic (OML)) is the one true logic,-as has been shown by quantum mechanical experiments. Putnam also has strong universalist tendencies, which would require him to use the same logic in all domains of reasoning, including mathematics, and it has been urged, recently (as one horn of a dilemma) by Hellman (1981), that there might be some problems in working out the classical mathematics of the Hilbertspace foundations of.quantum mechanics in a quantum logic framework.

In this paper we show (given one natural framework)(§3) first that if the first-order Peano arithmetic is formulated with quantum logic that it has the same theorems as the classical first-order Peano arithmetic. Distribution (for first-order arithmetical formulas) is a theorem not of quantum logic but rather of arithmetic.

Correlations between the behavior of pairs of particles are generated in the following experimental situation. An on-line source emits a stream of two-particle systems, where each system is in one and the same quantum state. After emission, the particles – call then (I) and (II) – move off in opposite directions. Each particle then encounters one of several possible barriers that either it passes or doesn't. A short distance behind each barrier is a detector set to register the presence of the particle, should it get that far. Finally, the detectors are connected by a timed relay and counter that registers a “coincidence count” should the two detectors fire within a set, brief time interval. When the experiment is run with various different barriers, detection rates accumulate for each barrier singly, and coincidence rates (the correlations) for the various pairs of barriers.

My contribution to this symposium is focused on the retreat from strong conditions of causality that have been forced upon us by quantum mechanics. My intent is to describe in more or less successive stages the retreat from the paradise of deteministic causation. This retreat has taken place through a thicket of quantum-nechanical details. It is ny intention to describe the general principles involved but to refer to the literature for proofs and full technical elaboration, even of matters that are crucial to the conceptual development.

The history of the efforts to prove or disprove the possibility of hidden variables begins at least with von Neumann and includes important work by Kochen and Specker and others, but much of the recent analysis has centered around Bell's inequality and related results. In spite of its importance and significance I shall ignore this earlier history and begin with these recent discussions.

‘Bell's Theorem’ is the collective name for a family of arguments, which more accurately should be referred to as ‘Theorems of Bell's Type’, all being variants of the remarkable argument given by J. S. Bell (1964). All of these arguments have the format E & H → I, where E is a description of a type of experimental setup involving pairs of particles emitted from a common source, H is a physical hypothesis which typically expresses some version of “realism” and some version of “locality”, and I is an inequality concerning correlations between particles of a pair. There are differences among theorems of Bell's type regarding the details of the inequality I , which are important in actually carrying out experimental tests. There are differences regarding the arrow—i.e., the procedure whereby I is inferred from E & H.

How do we collect data to test theories about syntax and semantics? For most of us, the process is very simple: We have a hypothesis, we construct sample sentences to test it, introspect about their grammaticality or meaning, and move on to modify our hypothesis as necessary. It would be fair to say that the standard method of data collection in syntax and semantics is personal introspection. This personal introspection is not totally uncontrolled, of course: Doubtful cases are checked informally with friends or colleagues; and there is an implicit, check when the referees accept a paper or an audience listens without objecting. What we have, in effect, is the introspection of the professionals, the people who know what the issues are.

This standard method has been enormously successful: Linguists have produced precise and interesting theories about syntax and semantics; and the bulk of the data on which these theories depend is undisputed and, we believe, undisputable.

It has become customary for linguists (especially generative linguists) to draw a distinction (initially rather unnatural for philosophers of science) between “internal” and “external” evidence. Usually classified as internal are data on the cooccurrence and alternation of linguistic elements in some language, as well as such systemic considerations as formal simplicity, economy, and the like. External evidence is everything else: the use of phonemes in rhyme schemes, patterns of acquisition, comparison to other languages, speech errors, dialect differences, historical change, and so on. The distinction is usually made invidiously--only internal evidence is probative--or defensively--external evidence, or at least some types of external evidence, are relevant and useful.

The distinction arises at two quite different points in the investigation of language. It arises first in the division of labor between linguistics and other fields.

Questions about the nature of the appropriate data for linguistics may seem a mundane matter, but they reflect deep issues about'the nature of language and of the science of linguistics, if science it be. Consequently the methodological modifications suggested by Carden and Dieterich (1981) and Zwicky (1981) could have ramifications far beyond a slight broadening of the range of data relevant to syntactic theory. In section 1, I review the arguments for the currently standard theory against the suggestion to broaden the range of data, and in section 2. I try to give a brief historical account of the origins of the presuppositions of the orthodox theory.

The current official conception of the goal of syntactic theory is that it is to distinguish syntactically well-formed strings of a given language from those that are not syntactically well-formed, and to provide structural descriptions of the sentences.

By “scientific realism” philosophers ordinarily mean the doctrine that non-observational terms in scientific theories should typically be interpreted as putative referring expressions, and that when the semantics of theories is understood that way (“realistically“), scientific theories embody the sorts of propositions whose (approximate) truth can be confirmed by the ordinary experimental methods which scientists employ. There are as many possible versions of scientific realism as there are possible accounts of how “theoretical terms” refer and of how the actual methods of science function to produce knowledge.

What I will do in this paper is to explore the consequences of one such version of scientific realism, a version which embodies the implicatures as well as the implications of the realist slogan that reality is prior to thought.

The empiricism/realism debates have been going on now for so long, in so many philosophical arenas, that any simple statement of the issue is bound to be wrong or biased. Yet we need a simple formulation to begin, if only to know who is meant to pick up which gauntlet. I shall begin with a short sketch of how I see the enterprise of philosophy of science, and then I shall describe what I take to be good empiricist views on two subjects: theory construction and experimentation. At the end I shall sum up with a simple recasting of the main points at issue.

Within philosophy, the philosophy of science is comparable to philosophy of law, philosophy of art, of religion, of mathematics. These disciplines are comparable in that each has as subject matter a large-scale cultural phenomenon, with its associated activities, institutions, products, language, and internal standards of evaluation.