Thomas Nickles

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

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!

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.

A serious problem for covering law explanation is raised and its consequences for the Hempelian theory of explanation are discussed. The problem concerns an intensional feature of explanations, involving the manner in which theoretical law statements are related to the events explained. The basic problem arises because explanations are not of events but of events under descriptions; moreover, in a sense, our linguistic descriptions outrun laws. One form of the problem, termed the problem of weak intensionality, is apparently solved by a simple logical move, but in fact the problem arises in a new, strong form. It is found that Hempel's model for deductive explanation (to which this discussion is confined) requires modification to handle the weak intensionality problem but then is faced with the problem of strong intensionality. In consequence, it is suggested that Hempel's important concept of explanation sketch is not as widely applicable as usually claimed, especially for explanations in the behavioral and social sciences and history. Reason is found to reject the covering law thesis that every scientific explanation must contain at least one law statement. An important feature of the discussion is that some of the main reasons given for altering the deductive model and for considering other forms of explanation are internal to the covering law theory

Science continually contributes new models and rethinks old ones. The way inferences are made is constantly being re-evaluated. The practice and achievements of science are both shaped by this process, so it is important to understand how models and inferences are made. But, despite the relevance of models and inference in scientific practice, these concepts still remain controversial in many respects. The attempt to understand the ways models and inferences are made basically opens two roads. The first one is to produce an analysis of the role that models and inferences play in science. The second one is to produce an analysis of the way models and inferences are constructed, especially in the light of what science tells us about our cognitive abilities. The papers collected in this volume go both ways.