PARTI The Philosophical Situation: A Critical Appraisal We must begin with the mistake and find out the truth in it. That is, we must uncover the source of ...

The book will serve as an excellent graduate-level textbook in cognitive psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence.

In this paper I offer an analysis of causation based upon a theory of mechanisms-complex systems whose internal parts interact to produce a system's external behavior. I argue that all but the fundamental laws of physics can be explained by reference to mechanisms. Mechanisms provide an epistemologically unproblematic way to explain the necessity which is often taken to distinguish laws from other generalizations. This account of necessity leads to a theory of causation according to which events are causally related when (...) there is a mechanism that connects them. I present reasons why the lack of an account of fundamental physical causation does not undermine the mechanical account. (shrink)

An account is given of the emergence of the concept of work as a basic component of mechanics. It was largely an achievement of engineer savants in France during the Bourbon Restoration , with Navier, Coriolis and Poncelet playing the major roles. Some aspects of the eighteenth-century prehistory are described, and also concurrent developments in French engineering. The principal problem areas were friction, hydraulics, machine performance and ergonomics, and especially in the last context the developments became involved with social and (...) even philosophical movements in the 1820s. Education played an important role throughout; several of the principal sources are textbooks. (shrink)

This paper argues that the much discussed issue between "scientific realism" and "instrumentalism" has not been clearly drawn. Particular attention is paid to the claim that only realism can "explain" the success of scientific theories and---more especially---the progressively increasing success of such theories in a coherent line of inquiry. This claim is used to attempt to reach a clearer conception of the content of the realist thesis that underlies it; but, it is here contended, that attempt fails, and the claim (...) itself hangs in the air. A series of increasingly sophisticated versions of the "instrumentalist" thesis is considered, and both these and the contentions of realism are placed in relation both to particular examples of scientific development and positions historically maintained by philosophers and by scientists. The author’s conclusion is that, when the positions are assessed against the background of the actual history of science, each of the contrary doctrines, interpreted with excessive simplicity, is inadequate as a theory of the dialectic of scientific development; each, so interpreted, has contributed in important instances to actual damage to investigations by great scientists ; whereas in both the theoretical statements and the actual practice of the most sophisticated philosophers/scientists, important aspects of realism and instrumentalism are present together in such a way that the alleged contradiction between them vanishes. (shrink)

To infer ontological features in the domain of a physical theory from its mathematical structures often requires one to consider an interpretation of the structures which goes beyond that necessary to provide an empirically adequate theory. I undertake this task for a set of mathematical structures of classical electromagnetism known as potentials. ;Since their first use in the nineteenth century through to their role within contemporary quantum theory, their interpretation has posed a number of problems and has sometimes been the (...) subject of controversy. The dominant interpretation outside the quantum context since the time of Heaviside and Hertz has been that they function as mere mathematical auxiliaries within the theory with no physical significance other than the electric and magnetic fields derived from them. ;By investigating the role of potentials in the field theory tradition of classical electromagnetism from its origins through to the present, I argue that this position is neither the necessary nor the proper one for interpreting potentials. My investigation begins with Faraday and includes the work of Maxwell, the "Maxwellians," and Weyl. I am able to counter the usual perspective by locating the precise reason for its establishment and showing why these reasons need not hold when the manner in which potentials represent empirical phenomena is properly understood. I further argue that there are good reasons to see the potential structures as vital to understanding the depth structure of electromagnetic theory. On this basis I argue to a number of ontological conclusions about the nature of the classical electromagnetic field. ;I also examine the role of the potentials as representing unquantized fields in quantum mechanics by a close examination of the Aharonov-Bohm effect. I argue that potentials now reveal fields as possessing a global, non-local property, with a sense of non-locality which I distinguish from the usual understanding of non-locality associated with this effect as well as from that associated with measurements on systems with correlated quantum states. (shrink)