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)

Penelope Maddy advances a purportedly naturalistic account of mathematical methodology which might be taken to answer the question 'What justifies axioms of set theory?' I argue that her account fails both to adequately answer this question and to be naturalistic. Further, the way in which it fails to answer the question deprives it of an analog to one of the chief attractions of naturalism. Naturalism is attractive to naturalists and nonnaturalists alike because it explains the reliability of scientific practice. Maddy's (...) account, on the other hand, appears to be unable to similarly explain the reliability of mathematical practice without violating one of its central tenets. (shrink)

Some of us think that the current consensus in the natural sciences is closer to the truth than it has ever been before. But for decades we have been told that important parts of this consensus are due to interactions of power, rhetoric and custom which have no tendency to promote truth in our own view. I think that the debunking of this debunking in The Advancement of Science is a devastating success, an awesome combination of erudition, philosophical insight and (...) conceptual resourcefulness. But I have doubts about related, constructive projects which seem to be interwoven with this counter-attack—doubts which are mixed with admiration for the resources and arguments that Kitcher provides. (shrink)

There are no "special sciences" in Fodor's sense. There is a large group of sciences, "historical sciences," that differ fundamentally from the physical sciences because they quantify over a different kind of natural or real kind, nor are the generalizations supported by these kinds exceptionless. Heterogeneity, however, is not characteristic of these kinds. That there could be an univocal empirical science that ranged over multiple realizations of a functional property is quite problematic. If psychological predicates name multiply realized functionalist properties, (...) then there is no single science dealing with these: human psychology, ape psychology, Martian psychology and robot psychology are necessarily different sciences. (shrink)

This essay contains a partial exploration of some key concepts associated with the epistemology of realist philosophies of science. It shows that neither reference nor approximate truth will do the explanatory jobs that realists expect of them. Equally, several widely-held realist theses about the nature of inter-theoretic relations and scientific progress are scrutinized and found wanting. Finally, it is argued that the history of science, far from confirming scientific realism, decisively confutes several extant versions of avowedly 'naturalistic' forms of scientific (...) realism. (shrink)

This article reviews the transition between post-Fregean anti-naturalistic epistemology and contemporary naturalistic epistemologies. It traces the revival of naturalism to Quine’s critique of the "a priori", and Kuhn’s defense of historicism, and use the arguments of Quine and Kuhn to identify a position, "traditional naturalism", that combines naturalistic themes with the claim that epistemology is a normative enterprise. Pleas for more radical versions of naturalism are articulated, and briefly confronted.

Any author should be happy when commentators on a long book discuss it thoroughly, raise important issues, and show their sensitivity to its main themes. So I want to begin with thanks to Isaac Levi, Peter Machamer, Richard Miller and Dudley Shapere. This is not, of course, to register agreement with all their criticisms. Indeed, that would be impossible, for their perspectives are so varied as to resist integration into a consistent synthesis. Nevertheless, each of them poses problems that my (...) approach to the growth of scientific knowledge must address, and I believe that the combination of their essays greatly advances the discussion. (shrink)