Headline, 20th July, 1976: VIKING I LANDS ON MARS. Certainly a triumph of space technology. But philosophically significant? Doubtful, but then we should not look for philosophy in material objects other than human brains. If we look for philosophy at the right spots in the technological process we are bound to find some, for there is philosophy in or behind every piece of human knowledge and in or behind every step of rational action.

We shall find philosophy, for instance, in the policy making that ended up in the decision to build and send off Viking I, as well as in the technological research that went into the implementation of that decision—and I am using the term ‘philosophy’ in its technical acceptation not in the popular one. Indeed one of the assumptions in planning the Viking I venture was that there might be life on Mars after all.

In the present paper I describe a general formal semantic scheme for the interpretation of quantum mechanics (QM) , and on the basis of this scheme I examine the modal interpretation of QM — both the Copenhagen and the anti-Copenhagen variants — proposed by van Fraassen [19, 20, 21], This is intended to be a fragment of a larger work [12] which additionally investigates a number of closely related interpretations, including ones proposed by Bub and Demopoulos [1, 2, 3, 4], Fine [5, 6], and Krips [16, 17].

Formal semantically speaking (see, e.g., Thomason [18]), a logic L may be characterized as an ordered pair <SYN,SEM>, where SYN is the underlying syntax (language) of L, and SEM is the semantics of L, which consists of a class of semantic assignments on SYN.

In his recent book Space, Time, and Spacetime, Lawrence Sklar has argued for a fundamental re-orientation in the philosophical study of the logical and epistemic status of the geometry of physical space. A very large part of the recent literature in this area, he notes (p. 109) has been concerned with the alleged bearing of the continuity of space on the question of whether geometry is the object of empirical knowledge, conventional stipulation, or utter ignorance. That continuity has been thought crucial is due, of course, largely to the enormous influence of the work of Adolf Gruhbaum (e.g., [9]). Sklar, however, argues (pp. 109-112) that the issue of continuity is in fact irrelevant to the logical and epistemic status of geometry, and that its pursuit leads one away from the fundamental questions involved. (See also Michael Friedman for a definitive critique of Grünbaum.)

Small differences can be very significant; this is as true of science and technology as it is with the sexes. To a first approximation, science and technology are strikingly similar; both deal with the world of matter and energy, and they deal with it in rather similar ways. Moreover, since the Renaissance science and technology have been growing closer to one another, in methods, organization and even in self-identification. Thus, there are some contexts in which it is quite proper to treat science and technology as the same. And this is valid in precisely the same sense that it is correct, in some contexts, to treat men and women as the same. But it is clearly fallacious to treat the sexes as identical in all respects. The same applies to science and technology.

One is tempted to begin with the infuriating philosophical ploy, “It all depends upon what you mean by ‘philosophy’ and by ‘technology’.” Those two words are in fact used in such fluctuating, imprecise, and implicitly controversial ways, that I am uncertain about the topic of this discussion. On being asked by an interviewer whether he minded answering questions, a great man said “No, I don't mind. If I can't answer a question, I shall give you an answer to some other question.” In this spirit, one might substitute for the question assigned to us the following one: “Can anybody identified as a ‘philosopher’ hope to contribute to understanding, and perhaps ultimately improving, whatever it is that people refer to as ‘Technology’?” In trying to answer this question, I shall outline my own conception of the tasks of a useful philosophy of technology.

Since there is a philosophy of science, it is not surprising that philosophers make use of case studies from the history of science in their work. However, the uses to which such case studies can be put depend on important, but not always acknowledged, ideas about how to understand science. According to one view, philosophy provides a theoretically precise account of science,and case studies are the raw material which, when reinterpreted according to a theoretical account, illustrate that account. Thus, just as formal logic is sometimes said to reduce ordinary language to a fixed and, from one standpoint, more convenient form, so the philosophy of science is often thought to perform a similar function for science. But other philosophers, with different ideas about how to understand science, think that case studies from the history of science can provide evidence for philosophy's claims about (scientific) rationality.

There is not space to offer detailed comments on each of four papers ([1],[2],[3],[4]). Nor does it seem fruitful to create a potpourri by commenting individually on one or two points from each. Instead I will attempt to develop one issue of general significance, an issue which is raised by all of the papers, though not explicitly discussed in any. Comments on points raised by the contributors will be woven in where they are relevant.

Anyone unacquainted with recent philosophy and philosophy of science might find it strange that the program of the Philosophy of Science Association for 1976 should include a symposium with the title: Are There Any Philosophically Interesting Questions in Technology?

Galileo occupies a unique position in the philosophy of science. He has a significant place both in the history of the philosophy of science and in the history of science, that is, both in the theory of scientific practice and in the practice of which philosophy of science is the theory. Moreover, virtually every philosopher of science has felt or feels the need to come to grips with Galileo, in the sense that he either derives his theories from his analysis of Galileo, or he tests the theories he has otherwise formulated by applying them to the case of Galileo. Finally, it has turned out to be possible for philosophers of science of almost any persuasion to use Galileo for their purposes, in the sense of finding evidence from Galileo to support their theories. It is this last fact to which I wish to call attention.

Around 1932 Carnap's philosophical development reached a point of equilibrium from which he would no longer depart significantly. The basic items of the conception of knowledge which he came to endorse at that time were three: a variety of reductionistic empiricism which he had illustrated in the Aufbau; a rejection of standard correspondence theories of truth (together with what looked like an endorsement of coherentism); and a syntactical understanding of the nature of philosophical activities. To many philosophers, even those whom Carnap considered his teachers or his allies, this set of views seemed absurd and incoherent. Russell saw in them a neo-neo-Platonism, inspired by a superstitious awe of language ([27], pp. 21, 141;, Schlick saw in them the irony of extreme rationalism stemming from extreme empiricism ([28], p. 69); and some Polish philosophers said they were “too sober” to share Carnap's views ([22], p. 233).

Feyerabend, Kuhn, and Lakatos have held that no objective reasons can be given for entertaining or working on a particular new theory, paradigm, or research program. I shall examine one of the-main cases they appeal to and argue that, although Copernicus's theory was not superior to the Ptolemaic theory according to any of the usual criteria for comparing theories, it did have features which provided the early Copernicans with good reasons for entertaining it and trying to develop it further.

Let us begin with Feyerabend. He has been a vigorous advocate of a “principle of proliferation” according to which scientists should always be considering alternatives to the theories currently accepted. Indeed, Feyerabend holds that scientists should strive to “invent and elaborate theories which are inconsistent with the accepted point of view, even if the latter should happen to be highly confirmed and generally accepted” ([4] , p.26).

Stephen Toulmin, in assessing the legacy of logical positivism, remarked: “Yet, even though we slay our intellectual parents, we cannot help but inherit from them…. While many of us whose philosophical careers began after 1946 reject the positivism of our forebears, it would be presumptuous for us to deny our inheritance entirely. At the very least, we share with our analytic predecessors a common stock of questions and problems about whose answers and solutions we disagree” ([28], p. 51).

In biological evolution organisms cannot choose which genes to retain, nor can they strive to introduce particular new genes. However, we, as philosophers, can choose which things we wish to inherit from our intellectual parents and which things we wish to eliminate as nonadaptive in our current environment.

There is something methodologically amiss in Cartesian science. Apart from some recent commentators ([1], [12], [13]), the source of Descartes’ problems is usually located in a Rationalist preference for the evidentiary force of “reason” rather than “experience” in the construction and testing of scientific hypotheses. In other words, Descartes’ metaphysics and theory of knowledge are said to imply a scientific methodology which precludes, or greatly diminishes, the decisive role of empirical evidence in the development of a viable science of nature ([2]; [14], p. 384-5; [15]. P. 15; [16]).

I wish to agree in general with the recognition of some kind of miscarriage in Descartes’ methodology, but I locate the source of his scientific weakness elsewhere. I argue that there is no unusual or especially significant opposition between reason and experience in Cartesian methodology - nor do Descartes’ problems derive primarily from his. metaphysics.

In adults and even in small children, visual perception is framed against a richly developed and relatively stable cognitive background. This background affects vision itself. Experimental evidence in cognitive psychology shows that the effects of this background on visual perception are logically immediate and not the products of reasoning or of deliberation. Nor are the effects of this cognitive background discovered solely in the patterns of use which the perceiver makes of visually received information. In this paper three of the principle aspects of epistemological treatments of visual perception are assessed in view of the cognitive structuring of the visual process. First, traditional distinctions among the sensory, phenomenal, and cognitive aspects of the visual process prove to be less clear than formerly they were thought to be. Second, the concept of perceptual strategies is argued to be reasonable and fruitful in the epistemological analysis of the visual process.

This paper is a reaction to two themes in recent history and philosophy of science. The first is the revival in philosophy of language of interest in truth and meaning, which relates to problems long discussed in philosophy of science. My tentative conclusion here is that tools are now available for the solution of these traditional problems, but that the detailed discussion by philosophers of language tends to by-pass philosophy of science, chiefly because it does not take sufficiently seriously questions about truth and meaning in theories and above all the question of radical theory change. A second theme, which is more implicit than explicit in this paper, concerns the fashionable tendency in post-Kuhnian philosophy of science for discussing philosophical problems in terms of case histories. These discussions have been motivated by the desire to avoid the threat of relativism and to restore rationality to theoretical science.

Every inquiry, or at least every inquiry that aims at knowledge, has a subject-matter - that which the inquiry is about, which is the object or set of objects studied. Let us, for the sake of brevity, and without further analysis for the present, call the set of things studied in an investigation the domain of the inquiry, and the particular things that make up the domain the items of the domain. (These “items” might, in particular inquiries, be spoken of as “objects,” “processes,” “behavior,” “facts,” or in still other ways; but such ways of speaking involve problems which, being irrelevant to present purposes, I wish to avoid by speaking more generally of “items.” Sometimes it is convenient to speak of classes of items as themselves items which are objects of investigation.)

In his book, Russell and Moore: The Analytic Heritage, A. J. Ayer takes issue with Russell's defense of scientific realism and his rejection of naive realism. ([1], pp. 126f.) Russell's position is succinctly stated in An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth ([3], p. 13) as follows:

There is an increasing recognition by friends of personal probability that the standard systems of personal probability do not provide a fully adequate basis for the theories of scientific inference and rational decision making. This recognition has methodological and formal components. On the methodological side, Jeffrey [8] and Spielman [16], [17] have suggested that personal probabilities should be interpreted as judgments about the credibility of propositions, i.e., as appraisals of the degrees of confidence that are warranted by the information available to the appraiser. The idea behind this interpretation is that there are criteria for appraising degrees of confidence as rational, plausible, silly or unwarranted. They have not been canonized, with the exception of the traditional informal fallacies of insufficient evidence, and if they were, would be highly vague and subject to revision as knowledge advances.

1. (1) This paper is an excellent example of putting a cart before the horses. It was originally conceived as a reply to my critics, of whom there have been many, and, in particular, to my fellow symposiasts, whose careful exploration of and sympathetic disagreement with certain views of mine which are not inappropriately labeled ‘scientific realism’ have deserved a response which they have so far not received.

2. (2) Many of the criticisms could, I believe, be construed as matters of detail and countered by a myopic strategy of confessing error here and claiming misunderstanding there, all supported by a judicious use of self-quotation. And, in moderation, of course is not inappropriate. I have made mistakes and, I believe, I have been misunderstood, and where the relevant points are reasonably substantial they should be noted for the record.

The project of formulating an account of scientific inference in terms of concepts drawn from probability theory, and based on the programmatic belief that inductive logic (that is, the theory of the principles of inductive reasoning) is the same as probability logic, is one usually associated in our own day with the names of such twentieth-century philosophers of science as John Maynard Keynes, Hans Reichenbach and Rudolf Carnap ([13], [27], [3]).