In defending NOA against some contemporary antirealisms I distinguish two antirealist camps: the epistemology inflaters, who come to their antirealism by filling up inquiry and belief formation with various warrants and principles of justification, and the semantic inflaters, or truthmongers, who come to their antirealism by exchanging truth for some epistemic notion, like ideal rational acceptablility. In parity with arguments against the correspondence theory of truth, which I see at the heart of various realisms, I argue against antirealist truthmongering in two ways. One is inductive and hortative. I point to the history of failures of all past attempts at theories of truth, and try to suggest better things for philosophy to do instead. The other way is deconstructive. I examine the attempted explications of truth in the terms set by their own discourses, and try to show that they cannot actually stand on their own there. Lily Knezevich looks at this deconstructive work in her ‘Truthmongering‘ and finds it flawed by what I will call ‘Knezevich’s fallacy.’ (Generously, she refers to it as my fallacy. But surely the rule in these things is to let the name, and therefore the honor, attach to the discoverer, not the alleged perpetrator.)

Niedenthal et al. recognize that cultural differences are important when interpreting facial expressions. Nonetheless, many of their core observations derive more from individualistic cultures than from collectivist cultures. We discuss two examples from the latter: (1) lower rates of mutual eye contact, and (2) the ubiquity of specific “functional smiles.” These examples suggest constraints on the assumptions and applicability of the SIMS model.

Child's play? Certainly Alison Gopnik is in good company in pointing to connections between science and child development. To mention just a few luminaries: in psychology, Freud (followed by Erikson and Piaget) looked at the developmental connection between children's play and adult work; in philosophy, Thomas Reid may have been the first to ground the faculty of reasoning in developmental stages that “unfold themselves by degrees; so that it [the child] is inspired with the various principles of common sense” (1764, V, 7). As for connecting commonsense reasoning and science, according to Einstein, “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking” (1954, 290). Quod erat demonstrandum.

This paper argues that Einstein subscribed to three distinct kinds of interpretations of the quantum theory: subjective, instrumental, and hidden variables interpretations. We explore the context and ihe content of Einstein's thinking over these interpretations, emphasizing Einstein's conception of his role not only as a critic of the new quantum theory but also as a guide pointing the way to better physics.

In the quantum theory the state of an evolving system is represented by a function that depends on time and perhaps on some other parameters. It is generally called the “psi-function”, and it evolves according to an equation called the Schrödinger equation. Indeed Schrödinger introduced the psi-function into physics. In the beginning (i.e., in 1926) Schrödinger thought that the psi-function referred to a fuzzy bit of reality. That is, he pictured an electron, whose state was given by a certain psi-function, as a pulsating bit of electricity, something like an electrical cloud or a patch of electrical fog. In short order, however, Schrödinger saw difficulties with this interpretation, and after trying out more sophisticated refinements he abandoned the whole project. What he abandoned was the program of trying to interpret the psi-function as directly representing some spatiotemporal features of the object whose state it characterized.