On this occasion, and in this place, I feel that I ought, and am probably expected, to look back at the things which have happened to the philosophy of science since I first began to take an interest in it over half a century ago. But I am both too much an outsider and too much a protagonist to undertake that assignment. Rather than attempt to situate the present state of philosophy of science with respect to its past — a subject on which I’ve little authority — I shall try to situate my present state in philosophy of science with respect to its own past — a subject on which, however imperfect, I’m probably the best authority there is.

As a number of you know, I’m at work on a book, and what I mean to attempt here is an exceedingly brief and dogmatic sketch of its main themes. I think of my project as a return, now underway for a decade, to the philosophical problems left over from the Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

We dedicate these papers to the memory of John Bell, whose contributions to, support for, and encouragement of the research program described here has meant more than words can say to those involved in it.

In Schrödinger’s “cat paradox” example, a nucleus which has a 50% probability of decaying within an hour is coupled to a cat by a “hellish contraption” which, if it detects the decay, will kill the cat. If we take the point of view that what we see around us is real, what occurs in reality is one of the two following evolutions :

(—> means “evolves in an hour into“).

According to Schrödinger’s equation, the evolution of the statevector describing this situation is

The right hand side of Eq. (1.2) does not correspond to either the reality on the right hand side of (1.1a) nor to the reality on the right hand side of (1.1b).

In this part we will consider recent attempts to get a relativistic CSL theory. The problem of getting such a generalization, or at least of making plausible that it exists, is of great interest. J. Bell (1990), after having expressed his dissatisfaction with the fundamental lack of precision of the standard formulation of quantum mechanics and the opinion that the only available acceptable alternatives are the Pilot Wave and the Spontaneous Localization schemes has stated: The big question, in my opinion, is which, if either, of these two precise pictures can be redeveloped in a Lorentz invariant way. The point of view of this paper is that what is most interesting is not a detailed exposition of the formal aspects of the generalization, but some crucial conceptual points which have come into focus in this attempt.

A cluster of problems — the “quantum mechanical measurement problem”, the “problem of the reduction of the wave packet”, the “problem of the actualization of potentialities,” and the “Schrödinger Cat problem” — are raised by standard quantum dynamics when certain assumptions are made about the interpretation of the quantum mechanical formalism. Investigators who are unwilling to abandon these assumptions will be motivated to propose modifications of the quantum formalism. Among these, many (including Professor Ghirardi and Professor Pearle) have felt that the most promising locus of modification is quantum dynamics, and in their presentations (this Volume) they have suggested stochastic modifications of the standard deterministic and linear evolution of the quantum state.

Biologists are remarkably visual people. Yet, the classics of logical empiricism never raised the general question of scientific illustration. Moreover, one suspects that the silence was, if anything, actively hostile. People did not talk about biological illustration, because they did not judge it to be part of “real science”. This enterprise produces statements or propositions, ideally embedded in a formal system. It may be about the real world, but it is not in any sense of the real world, in being a copy or mirror image. Philosophers recognized that regretfully human weakness demanded the visual. But it was judged at best a prop. (See, for instance, Braithwaite 1953, Hempel 1965, and Bunge 1967; although see also Achinstein 1968. The best discussion of scientific illustration that I know is Rudwick 1976.)

Propositions are no more constitutive of science than they are of any activity: a body of knowledge is not all there is to the life of science. Thus I take the premise underlying the topic of this symposium to be uncontroversial, there is a “non-propositional” side of science and of biology in particular. From time to time, however, philosophers ask whether the “non-propositional” side of science is theoretically superfluous, or as Duhem put it, logically dispensable. What they mean to ask is whether science can be fully analyzed in propositional terms; must philosophy of science, in other words, consider the non-propositional side in order to adequately account for science?

Negative answers to the question often rest on the tacit view that the most (or only) important thing about science is scientific theories.

Ecologists, particularly those who consider socially generated effects in the environment, grapple with complex, changing situations. Historians, sociologists and philosophers studying the construction of science likewise attempt to account for (or discount) a wide variety of influences, which make up what historian Charles Rosenberg has called “ecologies of knowledge” (Rosenberg 1988). This paper introduces a graphic methodology, mapping, designed to assist researchers at both levels—in science and in science studies—to work with the complexity of their material. By analyzing the implications and limitations of mapping, I aim to contribute to an ecological approach to the philosophy of science. Let me start with two diagrams to open up the territory I will be exploring.

Dansereau’s diagram (Fig. 1) conveys a dynamic equilibrium of energy and resource import, export, flows up a trophic hierarchy, and down again to exert control over lower levels in an ecosystem (Dansereau 1973).

The role of pictures and visual modes of presentation of data in science is a topic of increasing interest to workers in artificial intelligence, the psychology of problem solving, and increasing numbers of scientists in all fields who must deal with problems of how to represent large quantities of complex multidimensional data in an intelligible fashion. The use of pictures is marvelously illustrated by but not limited to the biological sciences, so I will use examples from elsewhere as appropriate. With the development of our visual technology—television, videotape, and the computer, the uses (and misuses) of visualization has properly become a matter not only of theoretical but also of practical concern. I will start with a practical story because it has multiple morals, both practical and theoretical—most of which lead elsewhere than I wish to go here.

The obvious metaphysical differences between Newton and Leibniz concerning space, time, and motion reflect less obvious differences concerning the relation between geometry and physics, expressed in the questions: what are the invariant quantities of classical mechanics, and what sort of geometrical frame of reference is required to represent those quantities? Leibniz thought that the fundamental physical quantity was “living force” (mv2), of which every body was supposed to have a definite amount; this notion violates the classical principle of relativity, since it makes a physical distinction between uniform velocity and absolute rest. But Leibniz did not try to represent this physical quantity in a spatio-temporal reference frame, assuming, instead, that all such frames are equivalent so long as they agree on the relative motions (changes in the mutual Euclidean distances) among bodies.

We have yet to fully understand the mariner or the measure to which logical empiricism emerged as a conventionalist response to both traditional Kantian and empiricist epistemology and to the apparent triumphs of “conventionalist stratagems” (in Popper’s aspersive locution) in the foundations of science. By “conventionalism”, however, is here understood a broader sense than customary, an extrapolation of views on the foundations of geometry and physics (associated in the first instance with Poincaré“) to an encompassing epistemological consideration of the development and validity of scientific concepts generally. In this new construal, the concepts of science are neither derivable from sense experience, nor are they transcendentally valid a priori conditions of its possibility. Rather they are “free creations of the human mind” whose provenance is “logically arbitrary”, as Poincare’ and (subsequently) Einstein put it.

Schlick has been accused of a number of philosophical sins over the years, most notably his rather casual, and frequent, traversing of the borders between language, experience, and reality. While we allow our scientists the freedom to roam creatively throughout the peripheral regions of Epistemology and Metaphysics, we are not so tolerant of our philosophers. We know that Schlick gave up the physics laboratory for the philosopher’s armchair, and we expect him to stick to a particular position.

Schlick’s colleagues in the Vienna Circle were not totally blameless in this regard, either, and it may be that part of the charm of their work is precisely their inability to stick to the positions that solidified over 2500 years of western philosophy.

This paper is a summary of my doctoral dissertation on philosophical interpretations of Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity, submitted to the Dept. for History of Science, Univ. of Hamburg, in 1989, which was recently published in the Series Science Networks at Birkäuser.2 After a brief overview of its content I will focus on a discussion of the method employed to analyse philosophical interpretations of a physical theory.

I take Newton’s arguments to inverse square centripetal forces from Kepler’s harmonic and areal laws to be classic deductions from phenomena. I argue that the theorems backing up these inferences establish systematic dependencies that make the phenomena carry the objective information that the propositions inferred from them hold. A review of the data supporting Kepler’s laws indicates that these phenomena are Whewellian colligations—generalizations corresponding to the selection of a best fitting curve for an open-ended body of data. I argue that the information theoretic features of Newton’s corrections of the Keplerian phenomena to account for perturbations introduced by universal gravitation show that these corrections do not undercut the inferences from the Keplerian phenomena. Finally, I suggest that all of Newton’s impressive applications of Universal gravitation to account for motion phenomena show an attempt to deliver explanations that share these salient features of his classic deductions from phenomena.

On the model of Newton’s Principia, the great majority of successful new theories in physics have been introduced by deduction from the phenomena arguments. In such arguments an explanatory theory is deduced from one or more of the empirical facts, or lower level empirical generalizations, which it is designed to explain, by the device of adjoining suitable higher-level theoretical constraints on the form of the required theory. Those theoretical constraints leave certain parameters, the precise form of certain functions, and so on, in the new theory, undetermined, except with the help of the lower level empirical premises.

There is a passage in Hume’s Enquiry concerning Human Understanding that I have always found striking and rather charming. It concerns a metaphysical theory that Hume regards as bizarre; and he offers two philosophical arguments in its confutation. It is the first of these that I have in mind:

David Hull’s approach to science, which culminated in his important book Science as a Process(1988), represents an unprecedented conjunction of philosophy of science with the results and concepts of a particular science. Hull takes an evolutionary approach to the conceptual development of science, importing much of his explanatory framework from comparative biology, the discipline where his empirical observations of scientists have been made. On the surface, such a cozy relationship between data, theory, and metatheory leads to worries about circular reasoning (Mishler 1989). Nevertheless, I will argue here that Hull’s approach is basically sound, and that the strength of his arguments comes precisely from his recognition of key analogies between the evolution of organisms and the conceptual evolution of scientists; however, certain disanalogies must also be taken into account.

Comparative biology can be divided into two distinct (although interrelated) halves based on differing orientations and types of questions asked.

David Hull’s book (1988) provides an evolutionary account of the development of science which pays attention to both the social and conceptual aspects of that process. Unlike most philosophers who only invoke Darwinian metaphors in a casual way, Hull takes the analogy between the biological evolution of species and the growth of scientific knowledge quite seriously and by providing abstract definitions of terms such as replicator, interactor and lineage, he makes it possible for us to see clearly the structural similarities between the two historical processes.

Other symposiasts will comment on how tight that analogy really is. I must remark in passing that I have never understood the intense interest which evolutionary epistemologists take in this comparison. Surely our major job is to understand how science works, perhaps by using evolutionary theory as a fallible heuristic, but nothing seems to hinge on the extent of the formal analogy.