On this occasion, and in this place, I feel that I ought, and am probably expected, to look back at the things which have happened to the philosophy of science since I first began to take an interest in it over half a century ago. But I am both too much an outsider and too much a protagonist to undertake that assignment. Rather than attempt to situate the present state of philosophy of science with respect to its past — a subject on which I’ve little authority — I shall try to situate my present state in philosophy of science with respect to its own past — a subject on which, however imperfect, I’m probably the best authority there is.

As a number of you know, I’m at work on a book, and what I mean to attempt here is an exceedingly brief and dogmatic sketch of its main themes. I think of my project as a return, now underway for a decade, to the philosophical problems left over from the Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Rudolf Carnap is principally renowned for stating with remarkable precision and rigor a rich variety of philosophical doctrines — doctrines which, thanks mainly to Carnap’s meticulous formulations, the philosophical world now holds to be clearly and fundamentally mistaken. Thus, it is Carnap who, in Meaning and Necessity (Carnap 1947), presents in detail the linguistic doctrine of logical truth and the semantic underpinnings of the analytic/synthetic distinction, providing thereby the grist for the mill of Quine’s highly influential and important attacks on precisely these doctrines. Again, it was Carnap who, more than any other, precisely delineated the program of inductive logic. This program is now, thanks largely to Goodman’s (1983) New Riddle of Induction, also considered hopeless. Carnap is now firmly associated with a bewildering variety of discredited views: reductionism and the unity of science; the verification criterion of meaning; logic as an uninterpreted calculus; Russellian logicism even in the face of Gödel’s devastating incompleteness results; etc.

We dedicate these papers to the memory of John Bell, whose contributions to, support for, and encouragement of the research program described here has meant more than words can say to those involved in it.

In Schrödinger’s “cat paradox” example, a nucleus which has a 50% probability of decaying within an hour is coupled to a cat by a “hellish contraption” which, if it detects the decay, will kill the cat. If we take the point of view that what we see around us is real, what occurs in reality is one of the two following evolutions :

(—> means “evolves in an hour into“).

According to Schrödinger’s equation, the evolution of the statevector describing this situation is

The right hand side of Eq. (1.2) does not correspond to either the reality on the right hand side of (1.1a) nor to the reality on the right hand side of (1.1b).

Traditionally, the proponents of empiricism sought for the starting point of knowledge in sensations that happen to us when we open our sense organs to the world. They analyzed the functioning of human faculties of sensation and cognition and the way these faculties are activated so as to discover the origin of ideas. Thus, they insisted on the priority of particulars to universals in the body of synthetic knowledge, and granted empirical facts the authority of truth. For that reason, they are opposed to the rationalists, who maintained that the most important part of synthetic knowledge is derived solely from first principles or ideas, and that these principles or ideas are “innate”—that reason can ascertain their truth intuitively without the use of the senses.

Logical positivism belongs to the empiricist tradition. However, it distinguishes itself from its empiricist predecessors in a very important way, so that its proponents thought they could overcome the difficulties raised against the older empiricists.

The most influential critique of the Logical Positivists’ analysis of scientific observation was posed by Paul Feyerabend in his classic essay, “Explanation, Reduction, and Empiricism”. Feyerabend countered the later Positivist conception with his so-called ‘Pragmatic Theory of Observation’ which was founded on two ideas. The first is that observation reports are ‘theory-laden’, in the sense that they are always interpreted in the light of the best current theory and are subject to reinterpretation when one theory succeeds another. Feyerabend traced the development of this idea in the early writings of the Positivists, especially Rudolf Carnap, in the classic discussion of protocol sentences. In that context, Feyerabend finds that the theory-ladenness of observation leads inexorably to the second idea of the Pragmatic Theory, that what counts as an observation report does not depend on either its empirical content or its logical form, but on its causal or pragmatic features.

In this part we will consider recent attempts to get a relativistic CSL theory. The problem of getting such a generalization, or at least of making plausible that it exists, is of great interest. J. Bell (1990), after having expressed his dissatisfaction with the fundamental lack of precision of the standard formulation of quantum mechanics and the opinion that the only available acceptable alternatives are the Pilot Wave and the Spontaneous Localization schemes has stated: The big question, in my opinion, is which, if either, of these two precise pictures can be redeveloped in a Lorentz invariant way. The point of view of this paper is that what is most interesting is not a detailed exposition of the formal aspects of the generalization, but some crucial conceptual points which have come into focus in this attempt.

Both inside and outside philosophy of science, the past 25 years has seen a remarkable increase in the epistemic importance attached to the role of background beliefs and values of agents engaged in cognitive inquiry. Emphasis on the role of background commitments has been beneficial in bringing philosophy of science back into closer relation with the varied forms of science. But at present there cannot be said to be any clear consensus among philosophers on issues of the theoretical status of such commitments, or of their import upon conceptions of scientific meta-methodology.

The situation worsens when one considers widespread suspicion today among many historicists and sociologists of science of the viability of philosophy of science as a normative enterprise. This marks the ground between normative epistemology and its critics. But to understand the skeptical attitude towards normative theory, one must attend to the background assumptions about normative discourse imbedded in logical empiricism, and in particular to the state of logical empiricist metascience just prior to the revolution of sorts that occurred in the 1960’s.

A cluster of problems — the “quantum mechanical measurement problem”, the “problem of the reduction of the wave packet”, the “problem of the actualization of potentialities,” and the “Schrödinger Cat problem” — are raised by standard quantum dynamics when certain assumptions are made about the interpretation of the quantum mechanical formalism. Investigators who are unwilling to abandon these assumptions will be motivated to propose modifications of the quantum formalism. Among these, many (including Professor Ghirardi and Professor Pearle) have felt that the most promising locus of modification is quantum dynamics, and in their presentations (this Volume) they have suggested stochastic modifications of the standard deterministic and linear evolution of the quantum state.

How do we characterize theoretical disagreement and how does this translate into strategies for practicing scientists? I integrate Kuhn’s (1962) notions of paradigms and problem-fields with Hull’s (1982,1988) concept of populational variation and Shapere’s (1974) characterization of domains in interpreting the Ox-Phos Controversy in bioenergetics (1961-1977). The analysis highlights the differences between intraparadigm disagreement (based on proposed solutions to shared problems) and interparadigm disagreement (based on the problems themselves and views of relevant domain).

Kuhn (1959,1962) introduced the notion that a single, uniform paradigm guides ‘normal science’. He further suggested that scientific communities undergo gestalt-like changes in research focus, implying that all disagreement is based on ‘incommensurable’ paradigms. Philosophers and historians of science concerned largely with how consensus is established (see Laudan 1984; Laudan and Laudan 1989) have found this problematic as a universal model (e.g., Lakatos and Musgrave 1970; Laudan 1977).

Biologists are remarkably visual people. Yet, the classics of logical empiricism never raised the general question of scientific illustration. Moreover, one suspects that the silence was, if anything, actively hostile. People did not talk about biological illustration, because they did not judge it to be part of “real science”. This enterprise produces statements or propositions, ideally embedded in a formal system. It may be about the real world, but it is not in any sense of the real world, in being a copy or mirror image. Philosophers recognized that regretfully human weakness demanded the visual. But it was judged at best a prop. (See, for instance, Braithwaite 1953, Hempel 1965, and Bunge 1967; although see also Achinstein 1968. The best discussion of scientific illustration that I know is Rudwick 1976.)

One of the most controversial ideas in recent philosophy of science is the incommensurability of scientific theories. For Kuhn, the claim that two theories are incommensurable is the claim that there is no common language within which both theories could be fully expressed (Kuhn 1977, p. 301). In others words, two theories are incommensurable if and only if they are articulated in languages that are not mutually translatable or communicable without loss. This type of incommensurability, according to Kuhn, is the result of changes in worldview. The proponents of different paradigms practice their researches in different worlds (Kuhn 1970, p. 150). They may have different classifications of objects in the world due to their different cultures. For example, the astronomers who belonged to Ptolemy’s paradigm grouped the sun, moon, and Mars into the same set, while the astronomers who belonged to Copernicus’s paradigm classified them into three different categories.

Propositions are no more constitutive of science than they are of any activity: a body of knowledge is not all there is to the life of science. Thus I take the premise underlying the topic of this symposium to be uncontroversial, there is a “non-propositional” side of science and of biology in particular. From time to time, however, philosophers ask whether the “non-propositional” side of science is theoretically superfluous, or as Duhem put it, logically dispensable. What they mean to ask is whether science can be fully analyzed in propositional terms; must philosophy of science, in other words, consider the non-propositional side in order to adequately account for science?

Negative answers to the question often rest on the tacit view that the most (or only) important thing about science is scientific theories.

Ecologists, particularly those who consider socially generated effects in the environment, grapple with complex, changing situations. Historians, sociologists and philosophers studying the construction of science likewise attempt to account for (or discount) a wide variety of influences, which make up what historian Charles Rosenberg has called “ecologies of knowledge” (Rosenberg 1988). This paper introduces a graphic methodology, mapping, designed to assist researchers at both levels—in science and in science studies—to work with the complexity of their material. By analyzing the implications and limitations of mapping, I aim to contribute to an ecological approach to the philosophy of science. Let me start with two diagrams to open up the territory I will be exploring.

Dansereau’s diagram (Fig. 1) conveys a dynamic equilibrium of energy and resource import, export, flows up a trophic hierarchy, and down again to exert control over lower levels in an ecosystem (Dansereau 1973).

Since the publication of Science and Values in which Laudan unveiled his “reticulated model of scientific change” (Laudan (1984)), he has published a series of articles emphasizing the naturalistic axiology inherent in this model. (Laudan (1986), (1987a), (1987b), (1989), and (forthcoming)). His epistemic naturalism makes the business of fixing rational beliefs about facts, theories, methodologies, and aims all together “cut from the same piece of empirical cloth.” Laudan’s position has numerous attractive qualities: It allows one to accept a great deal of the wisdom in historicism without caving in to relativism. It allows one to accept the seemingly inevitable annexation of the theory of knowledge by the sciences and yet still maintain a normative epistemology. Finally, it awakens philosophers of science’s dogmatic slumbers regarding the axiology of scientific inquiry, and stimulates historical research into the relation between practiced means and professed ends in the sciences.