Why does Bohr nowhere discuss the projection postulate? He has the courtesy to cast at least a few disparaging words at some other notions for which he has no use, such as quantum logic. But he will not even admit the projection postulate as a subject for discussion. Another way to raise the puzzle is to point out that, although Bohr has a lot to say about measurement, he won't even recognize the existence of what has come to be called the “problem of measurement”.

I have exaggerated slightly. We have one relevant comment, in the report of the discussion after Bohr's talk at the 1938 Warsaw conference:

The foundations of a number of scientific theories are more or less relevant to philosophy. The better a theory is at elucidating the structure of science and scientific method the more a study of its foundations is relevant for philosophers, particularly philosophers of science. But while philosophers have studied probability and induction, statistics has not received the kind of philosophical attention mathematics and physics have. Although the terms “philosophy of induction” and “confirmation theory” are common, the term “philosophy of statistics” is rarely used; and despite the fact that modern statistical methods have been used increasingly in a number of sciences, specific developments of statistics have been little noted in the philosophy of science literature.

Statistics has been fundamental for determining such things as whether a substance causes cancer, which method of psychotherapy gives the most recoveries, whether censorship causes the instability of nations, whether a fossil belongs to a man or a chimpanzee, whether there is regularity in the oscillations of the velocity of gas in the sun's atmosphere, whether an individual authored a piece of writing, whether the economy will improve, and numerous other issues involving uncertainties.

When the Unity of Science movement organized, Niels Bohr was listed as the first member of the Advisory Committee. He contributed a one page paper to Volume One of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (Bohr 1938). This paper stressed, but did not explain, the idea that to bring out the proper unity of science it is necessary to analyze the presuppositions underlying the unambiguous application of even our most elementary concepts. Since this rather trivial paper was the only contribution to the movement Bohr made, he might seem to have little interest in the unity of science.

The opposite was the case. Bohr thought that his explanation of the unity proper to physics was one of his most basic, and certainly his most misunderstood, contributions to science. Yet, he thought that he never succeeded in making his position intelligible to professional philosophers.

What is at issue between the propensity and the long run frequency schools of thought about objective probability? Recent debate, although vigorous, has contributed little to our understanding of natural law or statistical inference. Yet there is at least one real question, none other than the much maligned topic of emergentism. Although this invokes a number of metaphysical views, such as the unity of science, emergentism primarily poses a question of matter of fact. Is it the case that every stable frequency, correctly represented by a mathematical probability, is ‘grounded from below’ by probabilities that apply to individuals? That is, does the frequency distribution in the population derive from probabalistic facts about the individuals that compose it? Or are there some stable frequencies that pertain to populations, but do not derive from probabalistic facts about members of the population?

At least two approaches to these questions have been developed.

Much work in confirmation theory is directed towards finding or interpreting a function, c, taking on hypotheses and evidence as its arguments and returning a value by which the degree of support of the evidence for the hypothesis can be assessed. Confirmation functions are generally thought of as probability functions. That is, c(H,E) is thought to obey the axioms of probability theory, where H is an hypothesis and E the evidence being considered. A difficulty with this approach is that the various problems of induction, including Hume's and Goodman's, militate against construing any confirmation function as a probability function. To date, no satisfactory probability function has been found which addresses the general problem of ampliative inference and which is immune to the standard objections of the Humean or Goodmanian type.

These sorts of considerations suggest it would be promising to examine, as candidates for an acceptable confirmation function, functions which are not probability functions.

Mental imagery has been on the defensive for the last fifty years. Philosophers have argued that talk of mental images invites systematic confusion, that such talk is at best metaphorical, and that it consequently creates only an unfortunate illusion of explanation when it is taken literally. Such a prioristic objections ought to carry less weight in the case of experimental studies of imagery since empirical findings are likely to supply nonmetaphorical content where it is needed. Nevertheless, the same sorts of criticism have been put forward against experimental efforts. Added to this is a suspicion that mental imagery is not compatible with a strictly computational account of mental processes and hence it is out of step with the most promising research occurring in cognitive psychology. So, even in the case of experimental studies, there is a presumptive burden of argument on those who take mental imagery seriously.

Almost since the theories of Einstein and the quantum physicists came into being, a small but significant number of novelists, poets, and playwrights have turned to them for everything from casual metaphors to justification for the philosophies underlying their works. Until fairly recently, however, literary critics have tended to avoid the new physics, finding it uncongenial if not irrelevant. But over the last twenty-five years an increasing number of them, especially critical theorists, have turned to physics and even philosophy of science in the belief that these disciplines offer epistemological and methodological models applicable, to the problems of literary criticism.

The primary reason for this increased interest in philosophy of science is the rise of critical formalisms, particularly structuralism and its variants. Structuralism usually regards Russian formalism as its most significant precursor, but Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957) must also be seen as an important forerunner, since it provided formal criticism with a rationale.

Although we all speak of “representation”, philosophers and psychologists often have quite different referents for the term. Among philosophers, “representation”, or “a representation”, usually refers to a picture of some sort; and concerns with resemblance, realism, abstraction, and the like are prominent (Goodman 1968). Psychologists and some philosophers accept the term more broadly, and by representation mean something like symbol— that is, some mark that stands for, denotes, or represents something else (Howard 1980). I shall use the word in this latter way.

Goodman's treatment of symbols and so, willy-nilly, of representation, is the most sophisticated we háve. He has been concerned largely with reference—with what symbols may mean—and expresses the concern with a theory of the structure and function of symbols.

Literary study, along with other social sciences, has been thought by many to be incapable of progress because it, like the other social sciences, is culturally defined. The aims and standards of literary study always depend on the value assumptions and preconceptions of the culture which fosters literary study—for literary study is a social institution. Because literary study and other social sciences are social institutions, obvious difficulties arise with transplanting the aims and standards of social science in one society into another society. The idea of progress, however, appears to demand that we have aims and standards which apply independently of particular social contexts, and independently of the boundaries of a culture or an age. Thus the cultural definition of literary study has sometimes been thought to prevent progress in this field.

Max Weber proposed a strategy for working toward objective knowledge and progress in the social sciences generally, which can be applied to literary study.

The public image of private imagery is showing signs of a comeback. Not only does it again seem legitimate to talk about “having” images, there has been a tremendous revival of interest in the role of imagery in all aspects of cognition. But while the experimental work on imagery has been progressing nicely, there is little agreement over how best to interpret the empirical results. The newly gathered data not only has not convinced everyone of the importance of imagery, it has spawned a whole new generation of critics who are sure that imagist explanations of cognition are without merit. These critics generally do not deny that people experience images; rather they deny the significance of these phenomena for psychological theory. Some go so far as to maintain that the very notion of an imagist explanation is in principle misguided.

For more than a century social scientists and philosophers of social science have argued about whether or not the ontology and methodology for inquiry in the physical sciences is appropriate to capture adequately the regularities of social life and their underlying causal determinants. The issue arises because of the prima facie fact that human actions are structured not only by the laws governing the behavior of physical matter, but also by intentional systems—that is, by culture-wide systems of concepts, rules, conventions and beliefs, and by individual systems of perceptions, motives, and goals arrived at within these cultural systems. Consequently, it is not possible either to identify or to classify human actions apart from this intentional dimension within which human action occurs. Whether, and how, this difference in the nature of the subject matter of social inquiry requires “deviating” from the “logic” of the natural sciences then becomes the substance of the dispute.

The problem of the reduction of biology to physical chemistry has raised numerous controversies for several years. The reader is referred to Ayala & Dobzhansky (1974), Hull (1972, 1973, 1974, 1976), Polanyi (1967, 1968), Roll-Hansen (1969, 1974), Ruse (1971, 1976), and Schaffner (1967, 1969, 1974, 1976). Supporters and opponents of reduction are continually exchanging arguments and it is almost impossible, even for an objective reader, to discern who is correct.

The partisans of reduction insist that physical chemistry, contributes a very useful explanatory schema for the understanding of a certain number of biological processes. For instance, in genetics, great progress has been realized because of the contribution made by chemistry in the determination of the genetic code and in the understanding of the molecular mechanisms governing the laws of heredity.

In recent years, historicist understandings of science have come to prominence in philosophy of science and philosophy of social science. These approaches have been credited with putting forward a persuasive case that social scientific theories, like societies, are themselves historical entities. (Laudan 1979, p. 43; McMullin 1979, p. 57). Historicist studies have forced a re-evaluation of a number of important issues, among them the question of how methodologies are to be evaluated, and questions about how the relation of theory to observation is to be understood. (Laudan 1979, pp. 47-48).

Despite their successes, however, historicist approaches fail in two important ways: 1) they are unable to solve the problems posed by methodological relativism, and 2) they fail to go beyond treating theories as personages to the important questions of how these theories arise from particular social structures.

An often heard remark is that “discovery of the molecular basis of heredity means that all life processes are now or will shortly be explainable on a molecular basis.” This extreme view is defended with surprising vehemence by one faction of biologists. The opposing view, just as extremely expressed is that “no interesting biological phenomena have yet been explained by molecular mechanisms, not even genetic phenomena.” These two positions have been called the “reductionist” and “antireductionist” points of view. Since “reductionism” is given in the philosophy of science many different meanings, we choose the one which in our opinion could shed some light on the problems underlying this controversy. In our view all the emotion-laden epithets aside, “reductionism” has still primarily to do with “theory reduction” in the logical empiricist (or positivist) sense. Clearly this concept is inextricably tied up with that of “explanation”, and fundamentally it is explanations that this controversy is about.

Contemporary psychology has been dominated by two distinct paradigms, each of which have given rise to comprehensive and fruitful research programmes. The functionalist programme purports to explain our cognitive capacities — what Noam Chomsky (1965, pp. 3 ff.) dubs our “competence” — in terms of the operations and transformations effected on the available “information”. Explaining, e.g., an ability such as color perception means isolating the cues on which we rely in making our judgments as to color, and proceeding to explain how, on the basis of information available from such cues, we could come to reach our actual judgments. This will involve explaining, for example, how it is that our perceptions of color are constant and reliable despite substantial variation in the intensity of light impinging on the retina — particularly since the intensity of such light seems to be the only relevant parameter which could guide our judgments.

This paper deals briefly with two questions which I have discussed elsewhere (Koertge 1981 and forthcoming):

1. a) If all scientists were perfect Popperians (i.e., absolutely scrupulous with respect to methodology), how much influence could their backgrounds have? I include under background: the individual's “background knowledge” (in Popper's sense), psycho-sexual upbringing, class origins or identification, metaphysics, and ideology. This is a rather mixed bag and I hope the context will make clear whether it is primarily the person's values which are influential or his/her prescientific beliefs.

2. b) Having argued that it is possible for background to play a role, I then ask whether the ideals of feminism suggest the need for a new methodology and epistemology for science. I will comment in particular on Harding's paper in this volume.

By “evolutionary epistemology” I mean Darwinian models of the growth of scientific knowledge. Such models rely on analogies between the development of biological species and the development of scientific theories. Recent proponents of evolutionary epistemology include the psychologist Donald Campbell (1974a), the sociobiologist Richard Dawkins (1976), and philosophers of science Karl Popper (1972), Stephen Toulmin (1972), and Robert Ackerman (1970). I shall argue that the similarities between biological and scientific development are superficial, and that clear examination of the history of science shows the need for a non-Darwinian approach to historical epistemology.

The neo-Darwinian model of species evolution consists of Darwin's theory of natural selection synthesized with twentieth century genetic theory. The central ingredients of the neo-Darwinian model are variation, selection and transmission. Genetic variations occur within a population as the result of mutations and mixed combinations of genetic material.

Within the lore of nearly every scientific theory, among the facts, laws, theorems, and such that constitute the “truths” it expresses, are one or more principles. Physics textbooks, I know, usually mention them at the beginning, or during some interlude given over to general remarks or speculation. As examples, the uncertainty principle and correspondance principle of quantum mechanics come to mind (see, e.g., Messiah 1960). And associated with the general theory of relativity, which is particularly rich in principles, are a principle of general covariance, a principle of equivalence (or two), Mach's principle, and a general principle of relativity (see, e.g., Misner, Thome, and Wheeler 1973).

Where do principles come from? Generally, as I said, they are supposed to be “truths” about the working of the world: observations and experiments are appealed to as their sources. But this doesn't distinguish them from facts and laws.

In the 1950's and 60's there arose a plethora of claims that the structure of evolutionary theory was intrinsically different from the structures of the theories of physics—and thus from the structure that philosophers of science claimed to be the structure of scientific theories. There were claims:

1. 1) that evolutionary theory had no laws (Smart 1963);

2. 2) that evolutionary concepts were so peculiar that their definitions violated the ordinary standards for definitions (Beckner 1959);

3. 3) that evolutionary theory was not axiomatizable (Beckner 1959);

4. 4) that evolutionary theory made no falsifiable predictions (Scriven 1959, Manser 1965, Smart 1963);

5. 5) that evolutionary biology relied on teleological explanations which violated the deductive-nomological explanation form (Hempel 1965); and

6. 6) that evolutionary biology made significant use of narrative explanations which also violated the deductive-nomological explanation form (Goudge 1961)

Although Barry Barnes (1974, 1977) and David Bloor (1976, 1978, 1981) are co-workers in the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh, there are hitherto unnoted but fundamental differences in their programs in the sociology of science.

Bloor defines his “strong programme” in the sociology of science by three basic tenets (“causality,” “symmetry,” and “reflexivity”) and also claims to establish laws and to test a general theory of the causal links connecting cognitive and social factors in the history of science. (Bloor 1976, pp. 4-5). In other words, the “strong programme” aims to be: (1) Causal, i.e., concerned with the conditions which bring about beliefs or states of knowledge. (2) Symmetrical, i.e., appealing to the same sorts of causes and to the same patterns of causal explanation for all beliefs and cognitive claims, whether regarded as true or false, rational or irrational, successful or unsuccessful. (3) Reflexive, i.e., using the explanatory resources of the sociology of science in the critical evaluation and explanation of the sociology of science itself.