In this dissertation, I attempt to understand Joseph Priestley's scientific beliefs. I describe his scientific practices, for the purpose of showing how they shed light on two key issues in philosophy of science: scientific explanation and hypothesis confirmation. I discuss these matters in the historical context of the eighteenth-century Chemical Revolution. ;In the first chapter, I discuss Priestley's view of causation and reconstruct his account of explanation as a species of what is now called 'contrastive' explanation. A contrastive explanation attempts (...) to answer a why-question of the kind Why E rather than E$\sp\prime$? ;In the second chapter, I show that although the eighteenth-century chemists provided a remarkably coherent account of three chemical concepts viz. chemical element, chemical property, and chemical operation, they failed to offer any non-question-begging criterion which could be employed to distinguish these concepts from the corresponding mechanical concepts. ;In the third chapter, I argue that Priestley's chemical beliefs were similar to that of Antoine Lavoisier. Both were Stahlian chemists. Both accepted the identification of chemical properties with chemical reactivities, as a way to distinguish chemical substances from one another. However, I argue, Priestley's theory of matter was different from that of Lavoisier. This led him to reject Lavoisier's employment of the Principle of Conservation of Mass in establishing the chemical simplicity of certain substances. ;In the fourth chapter, I analyze Lavoisier's argument for the claim that water is a chemical compound and Priestley's refutation of it. I show the complex nature of these arguments and point out how each argument draws on various resources which might appear far removed from the answers to the local question involving the nature of water. ;In the last chapter, I first develop what I construe to be a distinction between evidence and data. I then show Priestley's inferential practices to be a species of Inference to the Best Causal Explanation. I propose some ways to evaluate the adequacies of competing causal explanations. I also consider the inadequacies of hypothetico-deductive and Bayesian accounts of hypothesis confirmation. (shrink)

Through a study of a sophisticated contemporary scientific experiment, it is shown how and why use of the term 'observation' in reference to that experiment departs from ordinary and philosophical usages which associate observation epistemically with perception. The role of "background information" is examined, and general conclusions are arrived at regarding the use of descriptive language in and in talking about science. These conclusions bring out the reasoning by which science builds on what it has learned, and, further, how that (...) process of building consists not only in adding to our substantive knowledge, but also in increasing our ability to learn about nature, by extending our ability to observe it in new ways. The argument of this paper is thus a step toward understanding how it is that all our knowledge of nature rests on observation. (shrink)

Information about the prehistoric past is available only in the material remains. To be meaningful, these remains must be interpreted under the influence of a theory of some general or specific aspect of the past. For this reason, prehistoric archaeology clearly shows the reciprocity between theory and evidence and the tension between having to impose information on the evidence in order to discover information in the evidence. We use a specific case in the archaeology of Minoan Crete, a case that (...) uses Central Place Theory as a guide to understanding the evidence, to demonstrate a coherence model of scientific knowledge. (shrink)