Thomas Nickles

One component of a viable account of scientific inquiry is a defensible conception of scientific problems. This paper specifies some logical and conceptual requirements that an acceptable account of scientific problems must meet as well as indicating some features that a study of scientific inquiry indicates scientific problems have. On the basis of these requirements and features, three standard empiricist models of problems are examined and found wanting. Finally a constraint inclusion-model of scientific problems is proposed.

I discuss changes of perspective of four kinds in science and about science. Section 2 defends a perspectival nonrealism—something akin to Giere’s perspectival realism but not a realism—against the idea of complete, “Copernican” objectivity. Section 3 contends that there is an inverse relationship between epistemological conservatism and scientific progress. Section 4 casts doubt on strong forms of scientific realism by taking a long-term historical perspective that includes future history. Section 5 defends a partial reversal in the status of so-called context of discovery and context of justification. Section 6 addresses the question of how we can have scientific progress without scientific realism—how progress is possible without the accumulation of representational truth. The overall result is a pragmatic instrumentalist perspective on the sciences and how to study them philosophically, one that contains a kernel of realism—instrumental realism.

The paper locates, appreciates, and extends several dimensions of Simon’s work in the direction of more recent contributions by people such as Gigerenzer and Dennett. The author’s “crowbar model of method” is compared to Simon’s scissors metaphor. Against an evolutionary background, both support a pragmatic rather than strong realist approach to theoretically deep and complex problems. The importance of implicit knowledge is emphasized, for humans, as well as nonhuman animals. Although Simon was a realist in some respects, his work on bounded rationality, satisficing, problem solving, heuristics, models, and scientific discovery mark him as a pragmatist. Indeed, he should be regarded as one of the great American pragmatists, alongside Peirce, James, Dewey, and a few others.

Although seriously defective, 17th-century ideas about discovery, justification, and positive science are not as hopeless, useless, and out of date as many philosophers assume. They appear to underlie modern scientific practice. The generationist view of justification interestingly links justification with discovery issues while employing a concept of empirical support quite foreign to the modern, consequentialist concept, which identifies empirical evidence with favorable test results (predictive/explanatory success). In the generationist sense, justification amounts to potential discovery or "discoverability". A partial defense of updated versions of these ideas is offered without disputing the importance of consequential testing. Much further work is needed!

The history of science is articulated by moments of discovery. Yet, these 'moments' are not simple or isolated events in science. Just as a scientific discovery illuminates our understanding of nature or of society, and reveals new connections among phenomena, so too does the history of scientific activity and the analysis of scientific reasoning illuminate the processes which give rise to moments of discovery and the complex network of consequences which follow upon such moments. Understanding discovery has not been, until recently, a major concern of modem philosophy of science. Whether the act of discoyery was regarded as mysterious and inexplicable, or obvious and in no need of explanation, modem philosophy of science in effect bracketed the question. It concentrated instead on the logic of scientific explanation or on the issues of validation or justification of scientific theories or laws. The recent revival of interest in the context of discovery, indeed in the acts of discovery, on the part of philosophers and historians of science, represents no one particular method'ological or philosophical orientation. It proceeds as much from an empiricist and analytical approach as from a sociological or historical one; from considerations of the logic of science as much as from the alogical or extralogical contexts of scientific tho'¢tt and practice. But, in general, this new interest focuses sharply on the actual historical and contem porary cases of scientific discovery, and on an examination of the act or moment of discovery in situ.

This book is intended as a reference source of “universal scientific laws, physical principles, viable theories, and testable hypotheses” from ancient times to the present. Robert Krebs states that he includes only the physical and biological sciences, including geology, but in fact there are also several mathematical and logical entries ranging from the Greeks to Gödel. The book contains over four hundred entries, in alphabetical order, averaging less than a page each, plus a glossary of nearly four hundred technical terms. Evidently, it is intended as a library reference for a general audience. It does not seem to be directed toward professional historians of science. The author is a retired university science administrator in the health sciences field.Opening the book at random, I find four entries on the facing pages: “Carnot's Theories of Thermodynamics,” “Caspersson's Theory of Protein Synthesis,” “Cassini's Hypothesis for Size of the Solar System,” and “Cavendish's Theories and Hypothesis.” It is hard to know what the principle of selection is, other than comprehensive coverage. But although it is impressive, the coverage is spotty. The famous story of Adams, Leverrier, and Neptune is not included, for example—perhaps because no new law is involved.To a historical scholar, such a project has obvious pitfalls; I will list some of them. First, it is whiggish in selecting and evaluating the entries from our standpoint and in often omitting now‐discredited content. For example, the entry on Carnot does not mention caloric, although it does mention the model of water flowing over a waterwheel. The book encourages the idea that discoveries and other major results are more or less punctiform, the achievements of particular individuals at particular times. To be fair, in his introduction Krebs does describe science as an ongoing, self‐correcting process in which “laws” sometimes turn out to be false or to need correction. The book is historically uncritical, since it accepts at face value that eponymous results were actually achieved by the person celebrated in the name. The entries are necessarily too brief to indicate much of the wider historical context, or even the technical context, in which the law or theory under discussion was developed. Krebs's statement of his intent, in the introduction to the volume, is theory centered and seems to take physics as a model, although in fact there are many entries from the biomedical sciences that do not neatly fit this model. The author's attempt to characterize his subject matter—scientific laws—is philosophically naïve. Finally, even if we leave aside the difficulty of making complex technical results accessible to a general audience in a very limited space, no single author can be expert enough to maintain a high standard throughout a volume of such scope. Krebs identifies no panel of expert consultants enlisted to check his entries.The entries that I sampled sometimes contained less‐than‐sharp formulations, inaccuracies, and even contradictions. For example, Krebs describes Aristotle, in cliché fashion, as a “philosopher” rather than as a “scientist concerned with observations and evidence” , but two paragraphs later it turns out that Aristotle based his account of spontaneous generation on observations! Krebs says that motion was self‐explanatory for Aristotle because things strive to reach their natural places. The entry on Euler mislabels his work on bodies moving with multiple degrees of freedom as the three‐body problem. Fermat's last theorem is said to remain unsolved, yet Krebs obviously prides himself on being up to date. The entry on Planck is historically inaccurate and physically misleading. And so on.For all that, I found the book rather interesting and useful. No reader leafing through it will fail to find this entry or that intriguing. Since the entries are short and discrete, the book makes good bedtime reading. And, given that the laws, principles, and effects are commonly called by these names, the book can serve as a source of general knowledge—but only as a starting point. Given the uneven quality, caveat lector!

Arguments, suggested by readings of Durkheim and Kroeber, for the integrity and autonomy of social theory are examined. These arguments may be construed as closure arguments on domains of social events and of social facts. Causal closure, ontic closure, and several kinds of nomic and explanatory closure are distinguished. Discussion of the relations of various kinds of closure, integrity, autonomy, etc. under plausible assumptions concerning causation and explanation leads to the conclusion that one main strand of the integrity arguments is defensible; special ontological assumptions are not necessary and are dubiously sufficient for autonomy. This general conclusion accords with the positions of the later Kroeber and of D. Kaplan, that integrity-autonomy is best considered a methodological, not an ontological issue--a matter of distinct levels of description and explanation, not distinct levels of reality