Clark Glymour

A reprint of the Prentice-Hall edition of 1992. Prepared by nine distinguished philosophers and historians of science, this thoughtful reader represents a cooperative effort to provide an introduction to the philosophy of science focused on cultivating an understanding of both the workings of science and its historical and social context. Selections range from discussions of topics in general methodology to a sampling of foundational problems in various physical, biological, behavioral, and social sciences. Each chapter contains a list of suggested readings and study questions.

The second edition of a unique introductory text, offering an account of the logical tradition in philosophy and its influence on contemporary scientific disciplines. Thinking Things Through offers a broad, historical, and rigorous introduction to the logical tradition in philosophy and its contemporary significance. It is unique among introductory philosophy texts in that it considers both the historical development and modern fruition of a few central questions. It traces the influence of philosophical ideas and arguments on modern logic, statistics, decision theory, computer science, cognitive science, and public policy. The text offers an account of the history of speculation and argument, and the development of theories of deductive and probabilistic reasoning. It considers whether and how new knowledge of the world is possible at all, investigates rational decision making and causality, explores the nature of mind, and considers ethical theories. Suggestions for reading, both historical and contemporary, accompany most chapters. This second edition includes four new chapters, on decision theory and causal relations, moral and political theories, “moral tools” such as game theory and voting theory, and ethical theories and their relation to real-world issues. Examples have been updated throughout, and some new material has been added. It is suitable for use in advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate classes in philosophy, and as an ancillary text for students in computer science and the natural sciences.

Nearly all accounts of the genesis of special relativity unhesitatingly assume that the theory was worked out in a roughly five week period following the discovery of the relativity of simultaneity. Not only is there no direct evidence for this common presupposition, there are numerous considerations which militate against it. The evidence suggests it is far more reasonable that Einstein was already in possession of the Lorentz and field transformations, that he had applied these to the dynamics of the electron, and that portions of the 1905 paper had actually been drafted well before the epistemological analysis of time.

The ultimate focus of the current essay is on methods of “creative abduction” that have some guarantees as reliable guides to the truth, and those that do not. Emphasizing work by Richard Englehart using data from the World Values Survey, Gerhard Schurz has analyzed literature surrounding Samuel Huntington’s well-known claims that civilization is divided into eight contending traditions, some of which resist “modernization” – democracy, civil rights, equality of rights of women and minorities, secularism. Schurz suggests an evolutionary model of modernization and identifies opposing social forces. In a later essay, citing Englehart’s work as an example, Schurz identifies factor analysis as an example of “creative abduction”. The theories of Englehart and his collaborators are reviewed again in the current essay. Published simulations and standard statistical desiderata for causal inference show the methods Englehart used, factor analysis in particular, are not guides to truth for the kind of data Schurz recognizes as common in political science. Recent work in statistics, philosophy and computer science that makes advances towards such methods is briefly reviewed.

“It ain't nuthin' until I call it.”Bill Guthrie, UmpireNumerous criticisms of Adolf Grünbaum's account of conventions in physics have been published, and he has replied to most of them. Nonetheless, there seem to me to be good reasons for offering further criticism. In the first place Grünbaum's philosophy seems to me at least partly an extrapolation of one aspect of the views on conventions developed by Reichenbach and others. Since I think many of the issues which Reichenbach attempted to settle in his various discussions of conventions in physics are genuine and important, and I also think that those aspects of his views on which Grünbaum has focused are among the least satisfactory, it seems important to suggest questions and answers about conventions in physics which may develop more satisfactory Reichenbachian themes. Secondly, Grünbaum's philosophy centers on a distinction, that between extrinsic and intrinsic properties and relations, which has never been made satisfactorily clear either by Grünbaum or by his critics. Until it is clarified we will remain unsure of just what he is claiming and why we should think it true or think it false. Finally, Grünbaum's replies to his critics, especially his most recent reply, [9], involve unusually important claims which fail to be buttressed by the arguments he gives. I have in mind such claims as that we can learn something important about the ontological status of properties and relations by examining descriptions of them, that on the most straightforward and literal interpretation, the general theory of relativity is inconsistent, and that the foremost advocates of geometrodynamics, Clifford and Wheeler, were and are enmeshed in contradiction. My own view is that all of these claims are dubious or false, but I shall be less concerned with establishing their falsity than with discrediting the arguments offered for them.

The notion of reduction in the natural sciences has been assimilated to the notion of inter-theoretical explanation. Many philosophers of science (following Nagel) have held that the apparently ontological issues involved in reduction should be replaced by analyses of the syntactic and semantic connections involved in explaining one theory on the basis of another. The replacement does not seem to have been especially successful, for we still lack a plausible account of inter-theoretical explanation. I attempt to provide one