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

Davidson's defective defense of the consistency of (1) the causal interaction of mental and physical events, (2) the backing law thesis on causation, (3) the impossibility of lawfully explaining mental events is repaired by closer attention to the description-Relativity of explanation. Davidson wrongly allows that particular mental events are explainable when particular identities to physical events are known. The author argues that such identities are powerless to affect what features a given law can explain. Thus a great intelligence knowing all the physical laws could not explain a single mental event, As such, Even if he knew all particular identities

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defective, 17th-century ideas about discovery, justification, and positive science are not as hopeless, useless, and out of date as many philosophers assume.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!

Economic competitive advantage depends on innovation, which in turn requires pushing back the frontiers of various kinds of knowledge. Although understanding how knowledge grows ought to be a central topic of epistemology, epistemologists and philosophers of science have given it insufficient attention, even deliberately shunning the topic. Traditional confirmation theory and general epistemology offer little help at the frontier, because they are mostly retrospective rather than prospective. Nor have philosophers been highly visible in the science and technology policy realm, despite philosophy’s being a normative discipline. This paper suggests a way to address both deficits. Creative scientists, technologists, business managers, and policy makers face similar problems of decision-making at their respective frontiers of knowledge. These areas should therefore be fertile ground for both epistemologists and philosophers concerned with policy. Here I call attention to the importance of heuristic appraisal for “frontier epistemology” and to policy formation. Evaluation of the comparative promise or expected fertility of available options comprises a cluster of activities that cut across traditional discovery/justification and descriptive/normative distinctions. The study of weak modes of reasoning and evaluation is especially relevant to socio-economic policy.

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.

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!