Rather than distinguishing between the natural and social sciences on the basis of their subject matter, it is often philosophically fruitful to start with the fact that most social phenomena are not amenable to investigation by laboratory experimentation. One can, in some cases, use randomized experimental designs to investigate causal relationships between social phenomena, but ethical and practical difficulties often preclude the use of such techniques. In the absence of these two empirical approaches, two principal alternatives are often used: causal models and quasi-experimentation. I shall focus on the former here, because the techniques involved offer an interesting example of how the context of investigation can affect the structural form of mathematical models used to describe phenomena. I have an ulterior motive, however. Little attempt has been made to link the substantive work on causal modeling with philosophical theories of probabilistic causality.

Most anthropocentrics are realists. By this I simply mean that most who are anthropocentrics do not realise it, and that when they are convinced of the fact they will abandon their anthropocentric beliefs and adopt some other view. So, for instance, when we are convinced that God did not make us in his image but rather, the contrary, we become outright atheists or at least radically change our theology. The would be realist William Newton-Smith, as we shall see, is such an anthropocentric, and merely pointing this out should be adequate for undermining his view.

Two of the most interesting and important questions today in the philosophy of science are (1) how (I.e., by what mechanisms) scientific opinion is made to converge to certain laws and theories and (2) what these laws and theories tell us. Larry Laudan's (1984a) Science and Values addresses the first problem and Nancy Cartwright's (T9BT) How the Laws of Physics Lie the second. Although the Issues are different, they are related and do have an important similarity. Both exhibit a tension between simplicity and complexity. In the case of scientific.consensus, the situation at first seems neat and simplesince there is usually an overall agreement among scientists about the major features of laws and theories. However, a closer look reveals a much more Involved Interplay among several factors to produce that convergence. On the other hand, the actual phenomena of the real world appear quite Involved whereas the fundamental laws science arrives at have a simplicity about them (at least to the trained or Indoctrinated eye).

Two summers ago Marjorie Grene described a mutual acquaintance as a young fogy. That immediately suggested a fourfold classification: Young fogies, old fogies, young turks and old turks. Marjorie's place in this classification is obvious; moreover, it is relevant to today's session. Were she just out of graduate school we would wait awhile to honor her. Here she a fogy we wouldn't bother.

One of the ways Grene has expressed her anti-fogyism has been her consistent attacks on reductionism, especially reductionism in the philosophy of biology. In this paper I want to discuss the common association between ontological reductionism and a methodological position I will call mechanism. I wish to make three major points: (1) Mechanism (as I characterize it) is not to be identified with reductionism in any of its forms; in fact, mechanism leads to a nonreductionist ontology.

In the house of philosophy of science are many mansions, and Marjorie Grene has lived — or at least taken rooms — in most of them. She has done everything from studies of concepts and presuppositions within particular sciences, chiefly the biological sciences, to analyses of notions such as explanation and reduction, which cut across many sciences, to extended reflections on scientific knowledge and practice Uberhaupt. In an important sense, however, Marjorie Grene is not a “philosopher of science” at all, if one means by that a practitioner of some technical specialty, but simply a philosopher — or, as she likes to put it, a “teacher of the history of philosophy” — who takes scientific inquiry seriously. Indeed, one of her major contributions has precisely been to insist that renewal in philosophy of science is inseparable from a fundamental re-thinking of the tradition of modern philosophy generally. It is this rethinking that has occupied her over more than three decades.

During a period stretching from the publication of the Phoenix Books edition A Portrait of Aristotle In the early 1960's through the appearance of a number of papers in the mid-197O's, Marjorie Grene turned her attention to the relevance of Aristotle's biological interests to his overall philosophy, and to the relevance of that philosophy to contemporary philosophy of biology.

A Portrait of Aristotle was one among the influences which, turned me, as an undergraduate, toward Aristotle and his biology. As I re-read Professor Grene's work on Aristotle in the summer of 1981, a number of key themes emerged which are relevant to her own views about the nature of biological science.

Physics is, above all else, mathematical. But its causal stories can be told in words. How then does mathematics bear on causal claims in physics? I want to make some very simple philosophical points about derivations, mathematical dependencies, and causal relations in physics. I am going to focus on the question, “How does mathematics provide theoretical support for physics’ causal claims?” Theoretical support is only one among a variety of kinds of support that a causal claim may have, but-I am not going to discuss how to balance these various kinds of support. Instead I will concentrate entirely on theoretical support and lay out some necessary conditions for the ideal case.’ Although the points I will make are not very involved philosophically, I will flesh them in with a very detailed example concerning gas lasers.

Hume contributed two ideas to our understanding of causality. First, he held that when one event causes another, the physical ontology of this situation contains two items, not three. There is the causing event and its resulting effect; but there is not, in addition, a third physical entity consisting of their causal relation. Causality, Hume believed, is a relation like that of one individual's being taller than another. Sam and Aaron are terms of this relation. Platonists may think that there is a third term here — an abstract object known as the Tal].er Ihan relation. But in the world of physical objects, Sam and Aaron are not joined by a third physical object that connects them in the Taller Than relation.

As the time for preparing these remarks drew nearer, I found myself warming to our assigned topic—“New Directions in the Philosophy of Mathematics”. What I like about it is the suggestion that the speaker will be pointing in some inspiring style towards a new vista, a new set of problems, a new direction in the field rather than proposing a substantial contribution to the solution to some already well-known difficulty. This image makes me feel less guilty about having no solutions of any sort to offer today. What I do have is a problem to pose, a problem that seems to me quite serious. If it isn't completely new, I can at least say truly that it hasn't received the attention that it deserves, that it is far from solved, and that it has become more pressing in recent years.

“And so, if I understand you correctly, you act and you know why act, but you don't know why you know that you know what you do?”

The problem that I want to discuss can be stated simply. For the sake of argument, I assume that knowledge is a relation between people and propositions, and that mathematical knowledge is a subspecies of this. Ordinarily, we are inclined to assume that we can account for one mathematician's knowledge without reference to any other mathematician. So in epistemology we assume that there is but a single ideal mathematician or that, at least as far as knowledge goes, an individual mathematician can be considered in isolation from all others. In so far as a community of mathematicians enters epistemology at all, it is after the already established fact of individual knowledge. The community typically serves as a device for the efficient distribution of knowledge.

There ie an old (c. 1967) argument due to Dana Scott tnat is not as well known to philosophers and logicians as it ought to be. I shall cone back to it later.

The principle of matheaatlcal induction asserts that every number belongs to any class tnat contains zero and also contains tne successor of any member.

Can the principle of mathematical induction be proved? That is to say, is there a way to show tnat every numoer oelongs to any class, that, etc?

Like any other statement, the principle of mathematical induction can be derived from itself, in zero lines. This quick and easy derivation is not a proof of mathematical induction: it does not show that induction is true.

Adam and Eve, Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday, Tarzan and Jane: these are the figures who tell white western people about the origins and foundations of sociality. The stories make claims about “human” nature, “human” society. Western stories take the high ground from which man — impregnable, potent, and endowed with a keen vision of the whole — can survey the field. The sightings generate the aesthetic-political dialectic of contemplation/exploitation, the distorting mirror twins so deeply embedded in the history of science. But the moment of origins in these western stories is solitary. Adam was alone, Robinson was alone, Tarzan was alone; they lacked human company. But each couple, each solution to the illogical insufficiency of a rational autonomous self, was fraught with the contradictions of domination that have provided the narrative materials of “the West's” accounts of its devastating collective history.

My topic is the relationship between science and values. Specifically, I will look at biological science, especially evolutionary theorizing, and at those values held dear (not to mention those values abhorred) by supporters of the feminist movement. Since discussions of this nature rapidly take on all of the fervour of a revivalist camp meeting, it is appropriate to begin with a text. I draw mine from Valley of the Amazons, the recent novel by Noretta Koertge. The conversation is between two women, Helen who is mllitantly anti-male, and Tretona, the heroine, who keeps one foot in the real world (of a kind), namely a philosophy of science department.

It is not easy to ask serious questions about sex and gender in the construction of science. Science is so constructed that the questions keep being transformed into something else. Sometimes into “external” questions about social context. Or into historical questions about bad science in the past (now corrected). Or into questions about suspect sciences like anthropology or primatology, but not real sciences like physics. Or into political questions about equal opportunity. Or perhaps into the ravings of Marxists and Feminists. It is particularly difficult to ask serious questions about sex and gender in philosophy of science, because of the ways in which its scholars have reconstructed science.

In “Primatology Is Politics by Other Means”, Donna Haraway talks about sex and gender so as to reformulate the way we talk about science. As I read her paper, there are two main investigatory concepts she uses. One is “social organization”.

I wish to pose an instance in which philosophy has made an explicit and I feel, very useful contribution to the resolution of a set of scientific problems. Some of this work has been done by philosophers with a biological bent, and some by biologists with a philosophical bent. Whether the upshot is philosophy of biology, I cannot say. But recent conceptual advances in the ontology of what we might call “large biological things” holds a number of practical consequences for macroevolutionary theory.

Let us begin by asking what is “macroevolution” and, consequently, macroevolutionary theory? The “Modern Synthesis“, of course, maintains thatvthe neo-Darwinian paradigm (i.e., natural selection united with a’ coherent theory of the principles of heredity) is both necessary and sufficient to account for most evolutionary phenomena, including macroevolution.

Can there be an empirical science of the mind? Opinions are divided. If within the purview of ‘mind’ we include the phenomena that are associated with such words as ‘reasoning’, ‘understanding’, and ‘judging’, then many philosophers would take the answer to be an obvious no. As these philosophers might say, understanding and judgment are “normative” notions; they are not processes, but achievements, and trying to investigate them empirically would make as much sense as trying to determine the meaning of the words ‘just’ and ‘right’, or of the term ‘good art’, by tape-recording random snatches of conversation and cataloguing the instances of these words and their contexts. But not everyone is so pessimistic. Indeed, tens of millions of dollars currently are being wagered on the chance that just like the solar system or the chemical elements, the mind can be made the object of empirical study.

This paper defends the thesis that the concept of verisimilitude is an indispensable tool for the fallibllist and realist epistemology. Part of my argument consists in suggesting that this concept has important applications within the history and philosophy of science (Section 6). But this is not enough to convince a critical reader who suspects that talk about “closeness to the truth” is perhaps meaningless - or “mumbojumbo”, to use Laudan's (1981) expression. Surely a necessary condition for the significance of verisimilitude is its existence. Therefore, I also have to outline in some detail a programme which, at least in my view, leads to a satisfactory definition of the degrees of truthlikeness for various kinds of scientific statements (Sections 3 - 5). But first I try to give a,diagnosis of the main reasons why Popper's theory of truthlikeness failed (Sections 1 - 2).