The demise of foundationalism in epistemology was complete by the time of the Second World War: knowledge and rational opinion do not rest on absolutely secure, self-authenticating foundations, neither in experience nor elsewhere. This realization came to philosophers in large measure at the hands of that same detested logical positivism so often been depicted as foundationalism's last gasp. (Cf. Reichenbach (1938), Ch. 3; in a larger historical perspective, the demise may possibly be dated much earlier.) I will not argue for this; I take the demise for granted. The task which lay, and still lies, before us is to find a way of life after foundationalism.

I would like to begin by addressing two pressing questions that may be raised regarding chaos theory: Is it actually about “chaos” at all? And is it actually a “theory?” The short answers to these questions are, respectively, “no” and “it depends.” With respect to the first question, scientists have appropriated the ordinary term that means utterly unintelligible disorder. But chaotic behavior in the contemporary scientific sense is manifestly intelligible, and the word “chaos” may lead to rnisunderstandings as weil as legitimate interest. So, in the first part of my presentation, I will offer a characterization of chaos theory and briefly address the use of this term in scientific enterprises.

As is weil known there has been an explosion of interest in classical dynarnics resulting from the relatively recent “discovery” that classical deterministic systems can be chaotic or in some sense random. Actually, their complexity had already been weil appreciated by Poincare in 1892 (MacKay, R. S. and Meiss, J. D. (1987), p. 7). Much interesting work is currently being done on classical chaos in both physics and philosophy. However, in the last fifteen years or so, the interest of some physicists has turned to the possibility that chaos, or chaotic behavior can be found in quantum mechanics as weil. Unfortunately, things are much less clear cut in the quantum case than in the classical. In fact, there is very little agreement about whether chaos in quantum mechanics even exists. In part this is because there is apparently no generally accepted definition of what chaos in quantum mechanics could be.

I wish to describe a program of research designed to provide experimental evidence for or against the existence of altruisrn in humans (also see, Batson 1991). Whether such an enterprise is at all newsworthy—or at all worth doing—depends, of course, on what one means by altruism.

I have worked with the following definition: Altruism is a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing another's welfare. I have juxtaposed altruism to egoism, defined as a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing one's own welfare. Altruism and egoism, thus defined, have much in common. Each refers to goal-directed motivation; each is concemed with the ultimate goal of this motivation; and for each, the ultimate goal is to increase someone's welfare.

Among cognitive ethologists, communication is widely supposed to be a good area for comparing animal minds (e.g., Cheney & Seyfarth 1990; Griffin 1991, and other contributions to Ristau 1991). There is, however, considerable controversy about how to define or characterize communication. We will not survey these attempts in this paper (see Philips & Austad 1990). Rather, we focus on conceptions of communication as transfer of informationfrom signaler to receiver. In conjunction with descriptions of human cognition in information processing terms, this conception encourages the idea that communication provides a “window” on animal thoughts’ (Griffin 1991, p.3). The first step in getting beyond this metaphor is to identify possible relationships between information and cognition. This paper attempts that first step.

Apparently stupid animals often do remarkably intelligent things. Leaf-cutting ants, for example, “plant” leaves in underground farms, where they cultivate particular species of fungus to provision their colony. In so doing, the ants act as if they understand the environrnental conditions that optimize fungus growth. Entomologists studying this behavior, however, are rarely tempted to interpret the ants’ activities as conscious or goal-directed. Instead, they view them as relatively inflexible adaptations to particular selective pressures. Ants are good at cultivating fungus, but this is not taken as proof of any general skills in problem solving or learning.

In 1963 Niko Tinbergen published a paper, “On Aims and Methods of Ethology,” dedicated to his friend Konrad Lorenz. This essay is a landmark in the development of ethology. Here Tm bergen defines ethology as “the biological study of behavior” and seeks to demonstrate the “close affinity between Ethology and the rest of Biology” (p. 411). Building on Huxley (1942), Tinbergen identifies four major problems of ethology: causation, survival value, evolution, and ontogeny. Cancern with these problems, under different names (mechanism, adaptation, phylogeny, and development), has dominated the study of animal behavior during the last half century (Dawkins, et al. 1991; Dewsbury 1992).

The term “cognitive ethology” was introduced by Donald R. Griffin in his book The Question of Animal Awareness (1976). He regarded “cognitive ethology” as a study of the mental life of animals particularly as they solve everyday problems in their natural world.

A cognitive ethologist focusses on problems faced in an animal's natural world. We should be open to the possibility that the animals are solving more complex problems than have typically been set them in the lab. Thus ethological data may reveal more advanced animal cognitive capacities. On the other hand, laboratory study can lead one to search in the wild for cognitive capacities not previously apparent; the various ape and other animal “language” experiments are a case in point (Ristau and Robbins 1982 and Ristau in press). Furthermore, raising the possibility that animals have complex mental processes and are conscious may change the way we explore their behavior.

There is one sense in which Bayes’ theorem, and its use in statistics and in scientific inference, is clearly uncontroversial. It is an authentic, certified, theorem of the probability calculus, and even the founders of classical statistical inference, Fisher, Neyman and Pearson, were explicit about seeing no difficulty in the use of Bayes’ theorem when the conditions for its application were satisfied. For example, Fisher writes, “When there really is exact knowledge a priori Bayes’ method is available” (1971, p. 194).

Classical Bayesian methodology is based on the following three principles:

1. (i) individuals have degrees of belief which, measured in the closed unit interval, and subject to a mild consistency constraint, are fonnally probabilities.

2. (ii) belief functions are updated with the acquisition of new evidence by Bayesian conditionalisation. In other words, if B is learned to be true, then your new probability function P′ takes the value P′(A) = P(A/B) on every A in domain P′, where P is your probability function prior to learning B.

3. (iii) where Hi is a statistical hypothesis and E sample data, the tenns P(E|Hi) in Bayes’ Theorem calculations are set equal to the probability assigned E by Hi.

In 1978 Roger Penrose opined that cosrnic censorship was “possibly the most important unsolved problem in classical general relativity theory” (1978, p. 230). Today the problem remains unsolved, but in the intervening years Penrose's sentiment about the importance of the problem has been shared by many leading researchers in relativistic gravitation (see, for example, Eardley 1987, Israel 1984, and Wald 1984a). This sentiment can be traced to several considerations. First, if a suitable form of cosrnic censorship obtains, then one can appeal to various “no hair” theorems for black holes to obtain a characterization of the final state of gravitationally collapsed bodies. The now Standard black hole thermodynarnics makes use of Hawking's area theorems, which in turn presuppose a form of cosmic censorship.

It is known from the singularity theorems of general relativity (see Hawking and Ellis, 1973) that, under a variety of circumstances, solutions to Einstein's equation with physically reasonable matter must develop singularities. In particular, for a sufficiently compacted body, trapped surfaces must be present (Schoen and Yau, 1983), and collapse to a singularity must occur. Of crucial importance for the theory of gravitational collapse is the issue of the nature of the final state resulting from such a coUapse. The idea that physically realistic gravitational collapse always results in a black hole-so that no “naked singularities”, visible to a distant observer, can occur-was first conjectured by Penrose (1969), although it had been implicitly assumed in many discussions and analyses prior to that time.

In 1802 a youthful Thomas Young, British physician and scientist, had the audacity to resuscitate the wave theory of light (Young 1802). For this he was excoriated by Henry Brougham (1803) in the Edinburgh Review. Brougham, a defender of the Newtonian particle theory, asserted that Young's paper was “destitute of every species of merit” because it was not based on inductions from observations but involved simply the formulation of hypotheses to explain various optical phenomena.

An odd sense of dissonance comes over me as I listen to the eloquent and eminently reasonable arguments presented by Professors Achinstein and Laudan. Nothing similar to either of their remarks would likely be heard today at a history of science meeting, much less at a convention, say, of the Modem Languages Association. Historians would be much more likely to ask what interests were served by the particular rhetorical characters of Whewell's or Brougham's or Mill's or even Young's or Fresnel's arguments. They would be deeply skeptical that arguments per se had anything much to do with the contagious expansion of wave methods during and after the 1830s. In their respective ways, and despite the obvious differences between them, Professors Achinstein and Laudan both feel that argumentation was a central aspect of the historical events involved in the establishrnent of wave optics.

In this paper, I shall be taking exception to a few of the ideas in Peter Achinstein's recent (1991). In some of these cases, I think he is flat wrong. But that does not diminish in the least my admiration for his book which is, in my judgment, the best extended piece of work we have on the epistemological problems posed by 19th-century physics.

The common cause principle, roughly speaking, consists of the following 2 subprinciples:

1. i) If 2 events (or types of events, or facts, or conditions, or …..) are correlated, and the one does not cause the other, then there is a third event (type of event, …..) such that the 2 events are probabilistically independent given the presence or absence of the third event. That is to say: for every pair of correlated events that do not have direct causal links there is a screener off of that correlation.

2. ii) This screener off occurs before the correlated events.