Since the mid-1970s, when philosophical scrutiny of biology began to be focused on evolutionary theory, the center of philosophical attention in that field has been what is called the “units of selection” controversy. In particular, two problems have attracted philosophical and, on occasion, biological attention: (i) should natural selection be regarded as capable of operating on groups of individuals as distinct units, or should such a process only be regarded as a special type of selection on the constituent individuals of such groups even when every member of the group, by virtue of its membership of that group, is affected by selection in an identical manner?; and (ii) similarly, should selection be regarded as “ultimately” operating only on individual alleles since, even when the genotype seems to feel the action of selection more directly, any change in the genotypic composition of a population also consists of a change in its allelic composition?

Within evolutionary ecology, there is a substantial tradition treating natural selection as an optimizing agent tending to produce maximal adaptedness to the environment. This includes the work of Sewall Wright and R.A. Fisher, as well as a number of influential modern defenders such as G.C. Williams, J.R. Krebs, Richard Levins, Robert MacArthur, E.O. Wilson, and John Maynard Smith. In one widely deployed class of models, the phenotype or behavior of organisms is predicted on the basis of optimization principles, assuming ”… that the organisms’ preferences are related to evolutionary fitness and that the options more prefeaed must lead to greater survival and reproduction” (Real and Caraco 1986, 371-2). Optimality is measured by some “currency,” or what Richard Lewontin (1987) calls a “criterion scale,” providing an independent operational measure of fitness.

Imagine two theories in a scientific controversy cast as competing teams in the Super Bowl, and you may get a “Scoreboard of experimental evidence” such as the following, published in a review article in 1970 (after Racker 1970, 135):

This figure compares two hypotheses in a debate in bioenergetics in the 1960s and 70s known as the Ox-Phos Controversy (Rowen 1986; Allchin 1990; Weber 1991). But its format, suggested by its title, bears a striking resemblance to the half-time recaps in televised football games: parallel assessments in several categories ask us to compare, say, how many yards rushed, number of first downs, passes completed, evidence for the role of the membrane, or evidence for ion transport, etc. (see also Sindermann 1982). Why did the review author—Efraim Racker, a research biochemist—borrow the scoreboard framework from sports to convey his assessment in science?

Many ecologists have questioned the status of proposed ecological “laws,” charging that they are devoid of empirical content and predictive power or that they are tautological, trivial, circular, or nontestable (Peters 1976, 1978,1991; Simberloff 1983, 1984; Simberloff and Boecklen 1981; Strong and Simberloff 1981; Strong and Levin 1979; see also Williams 1970; Ferguson 1976; Rosenberg 1978; Stebbins 1978; Caplan 1978; and Shrader-Frechette and McCoy 1990). As a result, a number of ecologists have urged their colleagues instead to “study … real organisms,” rather than worry about untestable theories and laws (Van Valen and Pitelka 1974, 925; Mclntosh 1982, 23).

In this essay we investigate the epistemological status of a prominent “ecological law” in order to gain insights about the characteristics of ecological explanation.

In “Facts, Artifacts, and Mesosomes: Practicing Epistemology with the Electron Microscope” (1993), Nicolas Rasmussen presents an account of the mesosome, a bag-shaped membranous structure first observed by electron microscopists in grampositive bacteria, as a test case for robustness. Rasmussen argues that robustness as a criterion for the reality or artifactuality of experimental results fails this test; for, after 15 years of interpreting electron micrographs of specimens prepared by a variety of techniques as supporting evidence for the existence of mesosomes, electron microscopists ultimately concluded that mesosomes were an artifact produced by these preparation techniques. According to Rasmussen, electron microscopists did not use robustness to “decide reliably between conflicting observations” (ibid., 231). Moreover, Rasmussen also claims that research on mesosomes “resembles that of high flux gravity waves as described by Harry Collins, especially in the obviousness of ‘experimenter's regress’ or logical circularity entailed in the evaluation of experiments according to their results…“(ibid., 256).

I hope to convince you that one way of testing the mettle of a theory of scientific explanation is to inquire what that theory entails about the status of brute facts. In what follows I briefly consider the nature of brute facts, and then survey several contemporary accounts of explanation vis a vis this subject. These include the Friedman-Kitcher theory of explanatory unification (Friedman (1974), Kitcher (1981) and (1989)), Peter Lipton's (1991) account of the nature of explanatory loveliness, and the causal theory of event explanation developed by Paul Humphreys in his (1989). It is my view that each of these accounts of explanation entails (or at least lends itself to) a false view about the nature of brute facts: according to each account, a brute fact is unexplainable and thus represents a scientific ‘mystery’, where by this expression I mean some manner of a lack of scientific understanding.

The premise of the present paper is the primacy of understanding over explanation. The question “is the act of explaining a goal in itself, or is it a means to an end?” is here answered by “explaining is a pragmatic concept and serves the purpose of responding credibly to a request for understanding.” Explaining is secondary, understanding is primary.

Given this view of scientific explanation, one is faced with the received view and the recent literature based on it. Models of explanation cast into the covering law format do not necessarily ensure understanding, nor do they necessarily provide sufficient information for credibility.

After explicating this dissatisfaction (Section 2) I shall first clarify what I mean by scientific theory, law, and model (Section 3) since these concepts are crucial for the covering theory model proposed in Section 4.

Carnap's attempt to develop an inductive logic has been criticized on a variety of grounds, and while there may be some philosophers who believe that difficulties with Camap's approach can be overcome by further elaborations and modifications of his system, I think it is fair to say that the consensus is that the approach as a whole cannot succeed. In writing a paper on problems with inductive logic (and with Camap's approach in particular), I might therefore be accused of beating a dead horse. However, there are still some (e.g., Spirtes, Glymour and Scheines 1993) who seem to believe that purely formal methods for scientific inference can be developed. It may still then be useful to perfonn an autopsy on a dead horse when establishing the cause of death can shed light on issues of current concern.

In Bayes or Bust?, John Earman (1992, 104-113) attempts to express in Bayesian terms a sense of “projectibility” in which it is logically impossible for “All emeralds are green” and “All emeralds are grue” simultaneously to be projectible. I argue that Earman overlooks an important sense in which these two hypotheses cannot both be projectible. This sense is important because it connects projectibility to lawlikeness, as Goodman intended. Whether this suggests a solution to Goodman's riddle remains unsettled, awaiting an account of lawlikeness. I explore one avenue that might prove illuminating.

Suppose we discover that object a is G, where our background beliefs K include that Ea. Earman notes that by Bayes's theorem, hypothesis H (“All E's are G”) is confirmed—i.e., .

According to general wisdom, quasianalysis belongs to the large family of Carnap's ingenious, but finally failed contributions to epistemology and philosophy of science. In this paper I want to show that this is not the case. Rather, Carnapian quasianalysis is to be considered as a promising theory of a representational constitution of scientific objects. That is to say, I intend to embed Carnap's approach of quasianalytical constitution in the framework of a general theory of meaningful representation (cf. Mundy (1986)).

The outline of this paper is as follows: In section 2 I recall the basics of the quasianalytical approach, taking into consideration not only the well-known account in “Der Logische Aufbau der Welt” (Aufbau) but also a rather unknown first version of quasianalysis (“Quasizerlegung”) which Carnap developed in an unpublished manuscript written in 1923. This paper deserves attention not only for philosophicohistorical reasons, rather it contains quite a lot of interesting features of the quasianalytical approach which do not appear in the Aufbau account.

In the philosophy of science, we are to assess critically and on their intrinsic merits various proposals for a consistent interpretation of quantum mechanics, including resolutions of the measurement problem and accounts of the long-range Bell correlations. In this paper I suggest that the terms of debate may have been so severely and unduly constrained by the reigning orthodoxy that we labor unproductively with an unhelpful vocabulary and set of definitions and distinctions. I first review this situation and how we arrived there. Then I present an alternative conceptual framework, free of many of the standard conundrums, and ask why we seem unwilling to pursue it as a serious possibility.

I begin by sampling how some of the central tenets of the standard, or “Copenhagen”, theory of quantum mechanics came to be formulated. As is typical for his writing on broader philosophical issues, Niels Bohr's pronouncements on the interpretation of quantum mechanics are often difficult to understand and at times just plain opaque.

Here I describe and defend a version of space-time substantivalism. My account is meant partly as a reply to an argument against a particular substantivalist position that can be found both in John Earman and John Norton's “What price spacetime substantivalism? The hole story”, and Earman's World Enough and Spacetime. Their argument, the Hole Argument, purports to show that substantivalism leads to a radical form of indeterminism within a class of theories that includes our best theory of spacetime, namely, General Relativity (GTR). The hole argument contends that the substantivalist must view diffeomorphic models of a spacetime theory as representing genuinely distinct physical situations. It is this contention I argue against.

The version of substantivalism I present, although not a traditional account, incorporates the important features of traditional substantivalist views.

Building on an idea by Pitowsky (1990), David Malament (private communications), Hogarth (1992) and Earman and Norton (1993) have shown how it is possible to perform computational supertasks—that is, an infinite number of computational steps in a finite span of time—in a kind of relativistic spacetime that Earman and Norton (1993) have dubbed a Malament-Hogarth spacetime.

Definition 1 A spacetime (M,g) is Malament-Hogarth just when there is a future endless curve with past endpoint and a point q∊M such that .

(Hereafter, the symbols “q” and “λ” are assumed to have the properties they have in Definition 1.1 shall also speak of a “λ-curve”.)

Various examples of Malament-Hogarth (hereafter, M-H) spacetimes are given in Hogarth (1992), but the following artificial example from Earman and Norton (1993) is perhaps the simplest.

Traditional empiricist epistemologies have raised major philosophical obstacles to a clear understanding of instruments. Empiricist philosophers have given scant attention to instruments as a separate topic of inquiry because the reliability of instruments is presumably reducible to the epistemology of common sense experience. Instruments function presumably to magnify our physiologically limited sensory capacities by linking the specimen's sensory properties to accessible empirical data; such data are then validated by the same empiricist standards used to access ordinary (middle-sized) phenomena. Thus, no epistemic insight is revealed by studying instrumentation per se, according to empiricists.

Critics of empiricism have championed the cause that all sensory data are theoryladen. Yet even this dictum has the effect of minimizing the philosophical significance of instruments. This is because many critics of empiricism are working within the empiricist's distinction between the subjectivity of theory and the apparent objectivity of data.

Scientists must often solve analytically or computationally intractable problems. Philosophers of science have problematized the nature and role of laws, theories and evidence by examining how scientists use abstractions (Cartwright 1990), idealizations (Laymon 1985, Brezinski et. al. 1990), approximations (Cartwright 1983; Laymon 1989; Ramsey 1990, 1992), and visual images (Wimsatt 1991, Ruse 1991) in such situations. Here, I problematize the nature and role of concepts by examining ideal types as a response to intractability. I focus on the work of Carl Wagner, a former director of the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry in Goettingen. Wagner used ideal types in his research on the oxidation of metal alloys during the middle third of this century.

I argue that: natural scientists do use ideal typical concepts; these concepts are distinct from ‘standard’ concepts; and ideal typical concepts provide one means of connecting a tractable theoretical model with the experimental evidence.

In order to discuss the question of the reduction of chemistry it will be necessary to begin with a brief review of what philosophers mean by reduction in science. I follow most authors on this subject by starting with the writings of Nagel (Nagel 1961). As is well known, Nagel stipulates that two formal conditions, namely connectability and derivability should be fulfilled in order to say that reduction of theory T2 to theory T1 has occurred. In addition he stipulates a non formal condition, that the primary or reducing science should be supported by experimental evidence.

Furthermore Nagel considers that reductions occur in two main varieties which he calls homogeneous and heterogeneous respectively. In homogeneous reduction the terms used by the reducing theory are also common to the theory to be reduced. For example Galileo's science of freely falling bodies was conceived of as separate from the mechanics of celestial bodies.

Hacking (1983) introduces an attempt to defend scientific realism on the basis of the reality of theoretical entities. This position, which is called entity realism, is based on disconnecting the reality of theoretical entities from the truth and explanatory power of theories that account for them. In this way, two problems can be avoided. First, if theories about theoretical entities are rejected, the entities themselves do not have to go with them and the realist thesis that we can have knowledge of what exists in the world can be sustained. Second, theoretical entities, which will replace theories as the grounds for the realist position, would be protected from attacks on the validity of the inference to the best explanation which underlies classical or “theory” realism. In other words, theoretical entities would be able to survive the collapse of the inference to the best explanation.