In his recent book, Time and Chance, David Albert claims that by positing that there is a uniform probability distribution defined, on the standard measure, over the space of microscopic states that are compatible with both the current macrocondition of the world, and with what he calls the “past hypothesis”, we can explain the time asymmetry of all of the thermodynamic behavior in the world. The principal purpose of this paper is to dispute this claim. I argue that Albert's proposal fails in his stated goal—to show how to use the time-reversible dynamics of Newtonian physics to “underwrite the actual content of our thermodynamic experience” (Albert 2000, 159). Albert's proposal can satisfactorily explain why the overall entropy of the universe as a whole is increasing, but it does not and cannot explain the increasing entropy of relatively small, relatively short-lived systems in energetic isolation without making use of a principle that leads to reversibility objections.

Alan Musgrave, Michael Friedman, Jeffrey Foss, and Richard Creath raised different objections against the Distinction between observables and unobservables when drawn within the confines of Bas C. van Fraassen's Constructive Empiricism (CE), to the effect that the Distinction cannot be drawn there coherently. Van Fraassen has only responded to Musgrave but Musgrave claimed not to understand van Fraassen's succinct response. I argue that van Fraassen's response is not enough. What remains in the end is an unsolved problem which CE cannot afford to leave unsolved, or so I argue; I then strengthen Musgrave's criticism and indicate that an extension of the epistemic policy of CE is mandatory to solve the problem. I also argue that Friedman's and Foss' objection against the Distinction in CE misses the mark on closer inspection. An objection due to Creath does hit the mark but can be taken care of without too much ado. All these objections seem alive and kicking until the present day; I try (and hope) to put them all to rest.

Myrvold (2003) has proposed an attractive Bayesian account of why theories that unify phenomena tend to derive greater epistemic support from those phenomena than do theories that fail to unify them. It is argued, however, that “unification” in Myrvold's sense is both too easy and too difficult for theories to achieve. Myrvold's account fails to capture what it is that makes unification sometimes count in a theory's favor.

The aim of this paper is twofold: first to sketch a framework for classifying a wide range of conceptions of scientific objectivity and second to present and defend a conception of scientific objectivity that fills a neglected niche in the resulting hierarchy of viewpoints. Roughly speaking, the proposed ideal of scientific objectivity is effectiveness in the informal but technical sense of an effective method. Science progresses when “higher levels of communicative discourse” are reached by transforming subjective judgments regarding the generation and reduction of data or the testing of theories into objective decision procedures that are automatic or mechanical.

I discuss two case studies from classical electrodynamics challenging the distinction between laws that delineate physically possible words and initial conditions. First, for many reasonable initial conditions there exist no global solutions to the Maxwell-Lorentz equations for continuous charge distributions. Second, in deriving an equation of motion for a charged point particle one needs to invoke an asymptotic condition that seems to express a physically contingent fact even though it is mathematically necessary for the derivation.

Naive deductivist accounts of confirmation have the undesirable consequence that if E confirms H, then E also confirms the conjunction H·X, for any X—even if X is completely irrelevant to E and H. Bayesian accounts of confirmation may appear to have the same problem. In a recent article in this journal Fitelson (2002) argued that existing Bayesian attempts to resolve of this problem are inadequate in several important respects. Fitelson then proposes a new-and-improved Bayesian account that overcomes the problem of irrelevant conjunction, and does so in a more general setting than past attempts. We will show how to simplify and improve upon Fitelson's solution.

Various systems that learn are examined to show how content is carried in connections installed by a learning history. Agents do not explicitly use the content of such states in practical reasoning, yet the content plays an important role in explaining behavior, and the physical state carrying that content plays a role in causing behavior, given other occurrent beliefs and desires. This leads to an understanding of the environmental reasons which are the determinate content of these states, and leads to a better grasp of how representational content can be carried by systems without an explicit representation.

J.D. Trout (2002) presents a challenge to all theorists of scientific explanation who appeal to the notion of understanding. Trout denounces understanding as irrelevant, if not dangerous, from an epistemic perspective and he endorses a radically objectivist view of explanation instead. In this note I accept Trout's challenge. I criticize his argument and defend a non-objectivist, pragmatic conception of understanding that is epistemically relevant.

This paper explores some connections between competing conceptions of scientific laws on the one hand, and a problem in the foundations of statistical mechanics on the other. I examine two proposals for understanding the time asymmetry of thermodynamic phenomenal: David Albert's recent proposal and a proposal that I outline based on Hans Reichenbach's “branch systems”. I sketch an argument against the former, and mount a defense of the latter by showing how to accommodate statistical mechanics to recent developments in the philosophy of scientific laws.

Bayesian confirmation theory offers an explicatum for a pretheoretic concept of confirmation. The “problem of irrelevant conjunction” for this theory is that, according to some people's intuitions, the pretheoretic concept differs from the explicatum with regard to conjunctions involving irrelevant propositions. Previous Bayesian solutions to this problem consist in showing that irrelevant conjuncts reduce the degree of confirmation; they have the drawbacks that (i) they don't hold for all ways of measuring degree of confirmation and (ii) they don't remove the conflict with intuition but merely “soften the impact” (as Fitelson has written). A better solution, which avoids both these drawbacks, is to show that the intuition is wrong.

The initial part of this paper explores and rejects three standard views of how scientific laws might be systematically connected with physical necessity or possibility. The first concerns laws and their consequences, the second concerns the so-called counterfactual connection, and the third concerns a possible worlds construction of physical necessity. The remaining part introduces a neglected notion of possibility, and, with the aid of some examples, illustrates the special way in which laws reduce or narrow down possibilities.

This paper addresses two examples due to Peter Achinstein purporting to show that the positive relevance view of evidence is too strong, that is, that evidence need not raise the probability of what it is evidence for. The first example can work only if it makes a false assumption. The second example fails because what Achinstein claims is evidence is redundant with information we already have. Without these examples Achinstein is left without motivation for his account of evidence, which uses the concept of explanation in addition to that of probability.

The evolution of the myxoma virus in Australia has been presented for many years as a test case for the hypothesis that group selection can function effectively ‘in the wild.’ This paper critically examines the myxoma case, and argues that its failure as a test case for this hypothesis has broader implications for debates over the levels of selection.

Recently in this journal Sherrilyn Roush (2004) defends positive relevance as a necessary (albeit not a sufficient) condition for evidence by rejecting two of the counterexamples from my earlier (2001) work. In this reply I argue that Roush's critique is not successful.

Hilary Putnam's The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays serves as his latest installment attempting to detail some of the historical background and recent controversies over the so-called fact/value distinction. In it, Putnam claims that the positivists' influence led to an inflated dichotomy, rather than distinction, between descriptive sentences and evaluative sentences. He argues that such a dichotomy is unwarranted through a number of arguments intended to show that attempts to “disentangle” facts from values always fail. However, in the process Putnam overlooks a number of interesting motives underlying the positivist movement, and disregards a now-enormous body of literature in the philosophy of science on descriptive and evaluative statements. Hence, his attempt, towards the end of the collection, to construct a viable philosophy of language that can support the dichotomy's collapse and an ethical theory that can support his discussion of the dichotomy's collapse appears somewhat weak. Nevertheless, Putnam engages his philosophical discussion with contemporary economic theory in order to motivate his central claim: that taking a somewhat interesting distinction between facts and values and inflating it into a dichotomy can, and often does, lead to disastrous policy decisions. Thus, the collection shines by highlighting real-world, practical and ethical consequences of certain philosophical and theoretical commitments.

There are few, perhaps no known, exact, true, general laws. Some of the work of generalization is carried by ceteris paribus generalizations. I suggest that many models continue such work in more complex form, with the idea of ceteris paribus conditions thought of as extended to more general conditions of application. I use the term regularity guide to refer collectively to cp-generalizations and such regularity-purveying models. Laws in the traditional sense can then be thought of as idealizations, which idealize away from the conditions of application of regularity guides. If we keep clearly in mind the status of laws as such idealizations, problems surrounding traditional topics—such as lawlikeness, corresponding counterfactuals and modality—no longer look to be intractable.

Using the occasion of the publication of a Blackwell anthology in the philosophy of technology, Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition (2003), as a key to the contemporary role of this subdiscipline, this article reviews the current state-of-this-art. Both philosophy of science and philosophy of technology are twentieth century inventions, but each has followed a somewhat different set of philosophical traditions and pursued sometimes divergent questions. Here the primary developments of recent philosophy of technology are examined with emphasis upon issues which might also be of greater interest to philosophers of science. These include epistemological, but also environmental and cultural issues. The bibliographical spread includes references to some fifty recent books in the field.