Cimpian & Salomon (C&S) propose that the inherence heuristic, a tendency to explain the behavior and other properties of things in terms of their intrinsic characteristics, precedes and explains “essentialist thinking” about natural kinds. This commentary reviews evidence that it is rather essentialism (or something like it) that precedes the assumption of inherence, and suggests that essentialism can do without the inherence heuristic altogether.

A theme of much work taking an “economic approach” to the study of science is the interaction between the norms of individual scientists and those of society at large. Though drawing from the same suite of formal methods, proponents of the economic approach offer what are in substantive terms profoundly different explanations of various aspects of the structure of science. The differences are illustrated by comparing Strevens's explanation of the scientific reward system (the “priority rule”) with Max Albert's explanation of the prevalence of “high methodological standards” in science. Some objections to the economic approach as a whole are then briefly considered.

To understand the behavior of a complex system, one must understand the interactions among its parts. Doing so is difficult for nondecomposable systems, in which the interactions strongly influence the short term behavior of the parts. Science's principal tool for dealing with nondecomposable systems is a variety of probabilistic analysis that I call EPA. I show that EPA's power derives from an assumption that appears to be false of nondecomposable complex systems, in virtue of their very nondecomposability. Yet EPA is extremely successful. I aim to find an interpretation of EPA's assumption that is consistent with, indeed that explains, its success.

It is widely thought that the size of a probability makes no difference to the quality of a probabilistic explanation. I argue that explanatory practice in statistical physics, past and present, belies this claim. The claim has gained currency only because of an impoverished conception of the nature of probabilistic processes and an unwarranted assumption that all probabilistic explanations have a single form.