The official model of explanation proposed by the logical empiricists, the covering law model, is subject to familiar objections. The goal of the present paper is to explore an unofficial view of explanation which logical empiricists have sometimes suggested, the view of explanation as unification. I try to show that this view can be developed so as to provide insight into major episodes in the history of science, and that it can overcome some of the most serious difficulties besetting the (...) covering law model. (shrink)

It is clear from the above discussion that if I had wished to do so I could have truthfully presented every paper as either testing a prediction, presenting evidence needed in the test of a prediction, or presentin a D-N explanation. (I would not have been able to do this if I had not been sufficiently familiar with the evolutionary literature to recognize what hypotheses were at stake in several of the papers; even when the authors mention the hypotheses they (...) frequently do so only in enough detail to put their paper in context for the knowledgeable biologist.) Since these biologists are working in a period of normal science under the paradigm of the modern synthetic theory of evolution, none of these papers is presented as a test of the modern synthetic theory; but since this theory was used in the derivation of each prediction, each one is a test of it as well as of the hypothesis mentioned. Thus, once we learn to recognize the predictions beneath their cloaks of invisibility, we discover that prediction testing is not, as philosophers have claimed, at best peripheral to evolutionary biology; it is central to evolutionary biology. (shrink)

A basic aim of E. Beth's work in philosophy of science was to explore the use of formal semantic methods in the analysis of physical theories. We hope to show that a general framework for Beth's semantic analysis is provided by the theory of semi-interpreted languages, introduced in a previous paper. After developing Beth's analysis of nonrelativistic physical theories in a more general form, we turn to the notion of the 'logic' of a physical theory. Here we prove a result (...) concerning the conditions under which semantic entailment in such a theory is finitary. We argue, finally, that Beth's approach provides a characterization of physical theory which is more faithful to current practice in foundational research in the sciences than the familiar picture of a partly interpreted axiomatic theory. (shrink)

Most contributions to Whewell scholarship have tended to stress the idealistic, antiempirical temper of Whewell’s philosophy. Thus, the only two monograph-length studies on Whewell, Blanché’s Le Rationalisme de Whewell and Marcucci’s L’ ‘Idealismo’ Scientifico di William Whewell, are, as their titles suggest, concerned primarily with Whewell’s departures from classical British empiricism. Particularly in his famous dispute with Mill, it has proved tempting to parody Whewell’s position in the debate by treating it as a straightforward encounter between an arch-empiricist and an (...) arch-rationalist. There is, however, a danger that an emphasis on the necessitarian and a priori elements in Whewell’s philosophy may well obscure the unmistakable empirical emphasis in Whewell’s theory of science. I think it is time to begin to redress the balance, by focusing attention on the significant ‘empiricist’ strains in Whewell’s philosophy of science. One of the most important of those strains is connected with the operation which Whewell calls ‘the consilience of inductions’. (shrink)

Much if not most recent literature in philosophy of biology concerns the extent to which biological theories conform to what is known as the "received" philosophical view of scientific theories, a descendant of the logical-empiricist view of theories. But the received view currently faces a competitor--a very different view of theories known as the "semantic" view. It is argued here that the semantic view is more sensitive to the nature and limitations of evolutionary theory than is the received view. In (...) particular, the semantic view better accomodates the fact that evolutionary theory is bound to change as a result of the evolutionary process itself. This unusual feature of evolutionary theory provides a good reason for reconsidering the received view and paying close attention to the semantic view. (shrink)