During the past two decades, much philosophy of science has been focused on issues about the norms and methods by which scientific theories are rationally appraised; and increasingly, philosophers have turned to history of science as a touchstone for assessing normative methodologies purporting to elucidate scientific rationality. But even among such historical methodologists, there is much disagreement and unclarity about how historical study of science can arbitrate between rival methodological theories; and until progress is made at this meta-methodological level, the very legitimacy of this role for history will remain controversial. (Keynotes in the controversy are sounded in Kuhn (1970b , pp. 235—41; Lakatos (1971); Giere (1973); McMullin (1976); Burian (1977); and Laudan (1977, pp. 158-63).) This paper begins by arguing that the meta-method implicit in much historical methodology is different from the explicit meta-methodology most often touted.

Much recent discussion has been devoted to questions concerning what role considerations of the history of science should play in developing and evaluating philosophical analyses of science. It is generally, if not universally, conceded that the philosopher of science must appeal in some way to actual scientific practice and to the historical development of actual science if his analysis is to have any content, and it has been argued (Achinstein 1977) that even the most “ahistorical” of the positivists made, or presupposed, such an appeal.

It is now fairly common to distinguish two polar positions regarding the relation of history to philosophy of science: radical logicism is the doctrine that an appeal to actual scientific practice or to the history of science can never serve to refute any philosophical analysis of scientific concepts, while radical historicism is the view that really there is nothing more to the philosophy of science than historical description and analysis (i.e., that conformation to the history of science is always the determining factor in evaluating the adequacy of a philosophical analysis of science).

Most philosophers have a schizophrenic attitude toward the history of science. On the one hand, they want their philosophical accounts of how science ought to be done to do justice to typical scientific practice; but on the other hand, they want to avoid any confusion of historical facts with philosophical norms. A fine example of such a schizophrenic attitude is the one expressed by Wesley Salmon who says: “If a philosopher expounds a theory of the logical structure of science according to which almost all of modern physical science is methologically unsound, it would be far more reasonable to conclude that the philosophical reasoning had gone astray than to suppose that modern science is logically misconceived.” (Salmon 1970, p. 73).

But after conceding so much, he takes it all back when he adds: “In spite of this the philosopher of science is properly concerned with issues of logical correctness which cannot finally be answered by appeal to the history of science….

Schrödinger's argument about a “cat penned up in a steel chamber” is a timely challenge to those concerned with the philosophy of quantum theory; the argument prompts difficult decisions about correlated quantum mechanical systems, locality, reality and completeness. Here Schrödinger's own text is reproduced and, in view of the text, several plausible axioms and formal rules are chosen. Then, beginning with the axioms and using the rules, a contradiction is derived. This result establishes that Schrödinger's argument can be viewed as a paradox, a derivation of a contradiction from plausible assumptions. A final section of the paper refines the paradox and treats two possible resolutions as representative of a watershed issue in the foundations of quantum mechanics.

Comments concerning the method of formalization were provided when I applied the method to the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument (1978).

The purpose of this paper is to defend ‘quantum logic’ against a vigorous attack of J.H. McGrath (1978). The case is serious, as he allegedly discredits quantum propositional logic showing it unmotivated and useless. The object of his criticism is the procedure of “taking a well-known theory and distilling its logic” (Finkelstein 1969), or “reading off quantum logic from quantum mechanics” (McGrath 1978). This procedure is indeed the corner stone of the quantum logic philosophy, so if it were be “discredited in a most general way” and shown to be “fundamentally misconceived” (McGrath 1978) then the idea of quantum logic has broken down. I am going to show, on the contrary, that McGrath's account of the ‘reading off’ procedure is not sufficiently precise resulting in the failure of his ‘acrobatic’ counterexample.

The purpose of this contribution is to consider a model theoretic semantics of quantum logic. The quantum logic to which we refer here comprises the system of sequential quantum logic (Stachow 1980b). This system establishes the implication relation with respect to logically connected propositions and also with respect to the more general class of sequentially connected propositions of the language of quantum physics.

A dialogic semantics for logically connected sentences is developed in Stachow (1976, p. 203), where it is shown that a logical system, usually called the system of quantum logic, is complete and sound with respect to the dialogic semantics. The dialogic semantics is extended to sequentially connected sentences in Stachow (1980b) and to modal sentences in Mittelstaedt (1979, p. 479).

In comparison with other approaches to a language for science, the dialogic approach is developed from a pragmatic and methodological point of view (Stachow 1980a).

The question is oversimple. We are more likely to find the right set of answers if we focus sharply a distinction which is invariably blurred by those who discuss the issue, especially those who argue that “temporal becoming” is a mind-dependent feature of reality. We must distinguish the “indexicality theme” from the “elapsive theme”. Failure to do so has bred some confusion, I think.

A bit of background first. Those who discuss the mind-dependence of temporal becoming think of that issue as analogous to the traditional one about the mind-dependence of secondary qualities. Do colors, felt hotness, and salty taste exist in the mind-independent world? Or only within experience? “Roses are red, just like some of our after-images.” “No they aren't. Roses only have a property of selectively reflecting light in the 7200 Å region. That makes them look red to us. But they aren't really red.” “You're both wrong.

The problem of the direction of causation has received considerable press. Justifiably so, since it is a major bottleneck in accounts of causation and explanation. But there is another, not unrelated, yet unexamined, temporal issue for those same accounts. Numerous writers have uncritically assumed that there are instances of simultaneous causation. (A necessary condition for e and e', two causally related events, to be in a simultaneous causal relation is that there be no time-difference between e and e' or that e and e' occur at the same time.)

The assumption is not impotent. Alleged instances of simultaneous causation have been used to argue against various views of causation/explanation. For example, Richard Taylor (1966), Douglas Gasking (1955) and Baruch Brody (1972) have used such cases to critique regularity or nomic-subsumption accounts. Myles Brand (1979) in a very recent paper uses simultaneous causation to challenge Wesley Salmon's statistical relevance analysis (1970).

“How does a poem mean?” asked John Ciardi, noted poet and critic (1959, p. 663). Because he was convinced that “there will never be a complete system for understanding poetry,” Ciardi urged his Harvard and Rutgers students to discover “the total experience” of a poem and never to look merely for what it means (1959, p. 666).

Like a good poem, the total meaning of the concept of matter always eludes us. As Heisenberg put it: what we know is not nature itself, but “nature exposed to our method of questioning.” (Cited in Capra 1975, p. 126). For this reason, and because high-energy physics is in a state of rapid development, it would be presumptuous to attempt to say what matter or elementary particles are (See Woodruff 1963, p. 578). Moreover this “what” question is more properly a scientific one, about the correct referents of a specific theory of matter. “How does ‘matter’ mean?” or “how does ‘elementary particle’ mean?” is more properly a philosophical question.

Few topics in the philosophy of science have received as much discussion as the topic of explanation. Yet as Hanna's (1979, pp. 291-316) survey of recent research on scientific explanation makes abundantly clear, the field is riddled with competing “paradigms”, “models”, and “formulas” with little sign of any consensus.

It is useful in this sort of situation to engage in metatheoretic ascent. What do we or ought we to expect of a theory of explanation? Unless some measure of agreement can be reached about that question, how can we expect agreement (or even rationally adjudicable disagreement) on the adequacy of particular candidate theories? The purpose of this paper is to sketch a meta-theoretic characterization of what: a theory of explanation ought to be like. The view I will put forth is surely not the only one, but it is a view which I believe to be implicit in the work of a number of influential writers on the subject, including Hempel (1965).

For some thirty years, now, discussions of explanation in science have begun with the theory most clearly articulated by Hempel and Oppenheim (1948). It has been modified, extended, and defended by Hempel with perserverance and patience since then (1965). As a result, it has served as the standard against which competitors strived, and the clarity with which it has been set forth and defended has played a large role in the fecundity of the debate it has aroused.

It is not my intention here to attack or defend the theory in any of its versions, but to examine some aspects of the debate as they bear on the development of our concepts of what science is about. For the theory has been, taken by its friends and its enemies to play a dual role: it is, on the one hand, intended to be descriptive of what science does; while, at the same time, it is to serve as a model or ideal of what science ought to strive to be.

Scriven, with his well-known bridge example, showed that explanations need not carry with them accurate or useful predictions. A bridge has collapsed, but there is no history of overload or natural shock. Metal samples taken near the break show severely reduced elastic capabilities of a sort usually associated with natural aging. Therefore, given that the bridge did fall, it fell because of this sort of metal fatigue. However, on the basis of current theoretical and measurement capabilities, it could not have been predicted that it would fall. (Scriven 1962, pp. 181-185).

The existence of explanations which lack true or even usefully approximate predictions is not restricted to complex situations in engineering. Nor are such explanations the exclusive property of the non-physical sciences. The existence of such explanations, I want to claim, is common in the physical sciences as well.

Although philosophers of science have always been interested in the actual work of scientists, there has been a strong turn in the last generation away from prescribing how science ought ideally to proceed and toward studying more carefully how science has proceeded. In part this turn has been a reaction to previous work in philosophy of science, which to many seemed misguided and largely irrelevant to the sciences. In part this change reflects a general scepticism about the possibility of doing traditional foundationalist epistemology. Such scepticism is itself a reaction to the failure of the foundationalist program of the logical empiricists. The contemporary turn toward careful empirical study of the sciences constitutes a new program for the philosophy of science, which I shall call ‘empirical philosophy of science’ or ‘the empirical approach to the philosophy of science’.

Among the numerous criticisms of sociobiology is the criticism that it is not genuine science. The attempts to support this charge are based on the beliefs that sociobiology is in some sense untestable (Allen et al 1976 and 1977; Sahlins 1977; Lewontin 1977) and untestable hypotheses and theories are pseudoscientific. There are, however, a number of difficulties with both of these beliefs. First, the testability criterion of genuine science is far from clear or well accepted. It is now obvious to most philosophers of science that hypotheses and theories do not occur in isolation. Numerous assumptions and hypotheses together form part of a general framework within which any hypothesis is formed, applied and tested (see, Quine 1951; Quine and Ullian 1978, pp. 96-107; and Kuhn 1970). The refusal to give up a hypothesis in the face of a negative test result is not only not grounds for considering it pseudoscientific but is also a common occurrence in scientific research.