It is shown that a number of questions, usually considered philosophical rather than scientific, can be reformulated to apply to a world of automata or “well-informed heat engines.” In some cases they admit of physical answers, but in many cases obtaining answers entails violation of the second law of thermodynamics. This is demonstrated explicitly for the problem of determinism and free will, for the discovery of the origin or ultimate fate of the universe, or for the discovery of causes or purposes in nature.

A recent proposal by Dr. W. H. McCrae, cosmologist and mathematician, to the effect that decisions between such cosmogonies as those of Hoyle and of Gamow are experimentally impossible by virtue of a general cosmological indeterminacy principle, is here examined and elaborated upon. Some comments on the “antinomies” in Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason” are made in reference to this principle as well as to the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle. If McCrae's principle is accepted, we will have moved a long way toward Kant's conclusion that a logically consistent understanding of an underlying “ultimate reality” is outside the confines of science—whatever one may think of Kant's own line of reasoning.

Definitions can be classified from (at least) two different points of view. We can ask what sort of statements definitions are, how they are to be justified, and what purpose they serve in the process of acquiring scientific knowledge. For lack of a simpler word, let us call a classification of definitions from this point of view epistemological. We can also distinguish different forms of definition; and a classification from this point of view is naturally called formal.

The possibility of a sub-quantum mechanical realm has been investigated in recent years by DeBroglie, Bohm, Vigier, and others. It is felt that what is needed in this investigation is some simple and direct resolution of the problem as to whether sub-quantum entities exist or not. By restricting attention to quanta of light energy there is presented a theoretical expression for a sub-quantum or micro-photon which has proven to be testable. It is possible by this development to bridge the particle-wave duality wherein these two conceptions become arithmetically commensurate with one another. The theoretical expression derived for the micro-photon also leads to a different interpretative approach to Planck's constant as well as the appearance of a new unit or element of mass.

During the last decade, in 1958 to be precise, an organizational confrontation took place: the essential issue before its membership was this: should the American Sociological Society (ASS) be rechristened the American Sociological Association (ASA). The results of the vote conclusively demonstrated that for a majority of the participants, it was preferable to be known as a group of ASA's rather than a bunch of ASS's.

As anyone who has ever seriously attempted to analyze the semantico-epistemological status of scientific theories has soon discovered, it is not easy to reconcile the belief that theoretical terms (i.e., terms which cannot be explicitly defined in the observation language) have genuine cognitive properties with the empiricist tenet that all knowledge derives from experience. Even if it be granted that knowledge can originate in experience without being about experience, it still remains to develop a coherent metalinguistic account of the truth-conditions of theoretical propositions and the designata of denotative expressions in the theory language. In a recent article, “On the use of Hilbert's e-operator in scientific theories” [1], Carnap has broadened his analysis of theories to include provision for the referential properties of individual theoretical terms. But while his account focuses more closely than ever upon the fundamental semantical problems of a theory language, his specific proposals amount to a repudiation of the very logical empiricism which he has so strongly championed these many years. In what follows, I use Carnap's notation and terminology throughout (including a pejorative sense of the term “metaphysics” borrowed from Carnap's earlier writings).

In 1958 I set down some thoughts that arose from an attempt to consider epistemological problems on the assumptions that (1) The biology of the human nervous system is relevant to epistemology and (2) The human nervous system, like every other object of biological investigation, is a product of evolution by natural selection. These thoughts lay more or less neglected until they were brought stunningly to mind by Professor George Gaylord Simpson's [1] recent paper on “Biology and the Nature of Science”. In that paper Professor Simpson writes: