Robert Nola

This is a collection of 23 papers plus an Introduction in a book which revives an old issue that some have declared to be long dead, viz., whether there is any way of demarcating science from other endeavors, but most importantly pseudoscience. This is a timely book that is well worth consulting since it breathes life back into an important problem. There is something in it for all, as the six parts into which it is divided indicate: “What’s the problem with the demarcation problem?”; “History and sociology of pseudoscience”; “The borderlands between science and pseudoscience”; “Science and the supernatural”; “True believers and their tactics”; and “The cognitive roots of pseudoscience.” No short review can hope to cover all the papers, so this is a selective response to chapters largely from the first part with a few forays elsewhere.Though many of the authors in this volume claim that scientists, and others, can allegedly discern individual cases of pseudoscience, they admit that it ..

Tensions between idealism and scientific realism have been resolved by an appeal to the theory/observation distinction. but many who support incommensurability reject the distinction in favor of a version of idealism, e.g., thomas kuhn who supports a version of relativist idealism in which the terms of a theory do refer, but only to a paradigm--relative world of entities. it is argued that the three kinds of idealism depend on a cluster theory of meaning for fixing the reference of scientific terms, and that a realist interpretation of the growth of science must eschew such a theory of meaning. the kripke-putnam theory for reference fixing of theoretical terms is employed to show how one term, 'mass', is referentially invariant despite change in the theory of motion from newton to einstein

Normative naturalism (NN), advocated by Larry Laudan, understands the principles of scientific method to be akin to scientific hypotheses which are then open to test like any principles of science. It uses a meta-inductive rule to test methodological principles against suitably presented episodes in the history of science. One strength of NN is that it provides the basis for a philosophical/historical research programme into the methodological strategies actually employed in the sciences. But for the philosopher interested in the grounds of scientific rationality NN is not without it difficulties such as: it adopts a strongly empiricist account of meta-method which rules out realist principles of scientific method from the test procedures; it uses principles of test which are either not agreed upon, or stray from the meta-inductive rule; it reveals its limits in presupposing answers, rather than offering solutions, to problems of scientific rationality.

The institutionalization of History and Philosophy of Science as a distinct field of scholarly endeavour began comparatively earl- though not always under that name - in the Australasian region. An initial lecturing appointment was made at the University of Melbourne immediately after the Second World War, in 1946, and other appoint ments followed as the subject underwent an expansion during the 1950s and 1960s similar to that which took place in other parts of the world. Today there are major Departments at the University of Melbourne, the University of New South Wales and the University of Wollongong, and smaller groups active in many other parts of Australia and in New Zealand. "Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science" aims to provide a distinctive publication outlet for Australian and New Zealand scholars working in the general area of history, philosophy and social studies of science. Each volume comprises a group of essays on a connected theme, edited by an Australian or a New Zealander with special expertise in that particular area. Papers address general issues, however, rather than local ones; parochial topics are avoided. Further more, though in each volume a majority of the contributors is from Australia or New Zealand, contributions from elsewhere are by no means ruled out. Quite the reverse, in fact - they are actively encour aged wherever appropriate to the balance of the volume in question.

It is convenient to review these two books together because of the obvious indebtedness of the latter to the former. The book by Carnap is the first English translation of his classic Der Logische Aufbau der Welt initially published in Berlin in 1928. It also includes his short Scheinprobleme in der Philosophic published first in the same year. The translator has produced a very readable text of two complex works and Carnap has added a new preface outlining his present attitude to his work of over thirty years ago together with a short bibliography of recent publications relevant to the Aufbau.

Many philosophical naturalists eschew analysis in favor of discovering metaphysical truths from the a posteriori, contending that analysis does not lead to philosophical insight. A countercurrent to this approach seeks to reconcile a certain account of conceptual analysis with philosophical naturalism; prominent and influential proponents of this methodology include the late David Lewis, Frank Jackson, Michael Smith, Philip Pettit, and David Armstrong. Naturalistic analysis is a tool for locating in the scientifically given world objects and properties we quantify over in everyday discourse. This collection gathers work from a range of prominent philosophers who are working within this tradition, offering important new work as well as critical evaluations of the methodology. Its centerpiece is an important posthumous paper by David Lewis, "Ramseyan Humility," published here for the first time. The contributors first address issues of philosophy of mind, semantics, and the new methodology's a priori character, then turn to matters of metaphysics, and finally consider problems regarding normativity. Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism is one of the first efforts to apply this approach to such a wide range of philosophical issues. _Contributors: _David Braddon-Mitchell, Mark Colyvan, Frank Jackson, Justine Kingsbury, Fred Kroon, David Lewis, Dustin Locke, Kelby Mason, Jonathan McKeown-Green, Peter Menzies, Robert Nola, Daniel Nolan, Philip Pettit, Huw Price, Denis Robinson, Steve Stich, Daniel Stoljar The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket