Contemporary empiricism has attempted to ground its analysis of science in a falsificationism based in selection theory. This paper links these evolutionary epistemologies with commitments to certain epistemological and ontological assumptions found in the later work of K. Popper, D. Campbell, and D. Hull. I argue that their assumptions about the character of contemporary empiricism are part of a shared paradigm of epistemological explanation which results in unresolved tensions within their own projects. I argue further that their claim to be doing a science of science is not defensible. Hull's selectionism is analyzed to show how this epistemological agenda has played itself out in late empiricism. I suggest some directions that Hull might take toward an historical epistemology.

The paper claims that analytic philosophy has failed within the philosophy of science due to the way the dynamic aspect of scientific theories is traditionally treated. On the formal side this failure manifests itself in the first-order logical and the model-theoretic analyses of scientific theories. An amendment of the treatment is sketched. It is based on using model generation, of the kind used in proving the Completeness Theorem for first-order logic, in such a way that some dynamic quantities in the dynamic theory are formally represented as functions relating closed terms and sentences to their interpretations in a generated model.

Although accounts of evolutionary altruism which leave the question of whether altruism can evolve in nature open to empirical confirmation/refutation have been worked out for special (two-trait) cases, no real effort has been made to work out such accounts for general (N-trait) cases. It is tempting to take this lack of attention as evidence for an inextricably conventional element, which precludes such accounts from being of practical scientific value. I argue that such accounts do generalize in a natural way. As is often the case in science, generalizing theoretically simplified notions is not straightforward because of issues hidden in the special case. These issues do not, however, turn out to be essentially conventional.

Neurath's proposal for the form of protocol statements explicates the multiple embedding of a singular sentence as specifying different conditions for the acceptance of such a sentence as a bona fide scientific datum. Before theories are accepted or rejected in the light of such evidence, however, a further condition must be met which Neurath did not formalize. The different conditions are discussed and shown to constitute a naturalistic theory of scientific data and a pragmatic theory of theory acceptance.

Butterfield's (1992a,b,c) claim of the equivalence of absence of Lewisian probabilistic counterfactual causality (LC) to Hellman's stochastic Einstein locality (SEL) is questioned. Butterfield's assumption on which the proof of his claim is based would suffice to prove that SEL implies absence of LC also for appropriately given versions of these notions in algebraic quantum field theory, but the assumption is not an admissible one. The conclusion must be that the relation of SEL and absence of LC is open, and that they may be independent.

This essay is a philosophical evaluation of some of the findings of Wald and Penrose in which they claim to have supported an arrow (or the irreversibility) of time in quantum gravity. First, the notion of lawlike irreversibility (or anisotropy) of time is spelled out, then the general situation in quantum mechanics is briefly discussed. Finally, the findings in quantum gravity are evaluated against such a background. My conclusion is that the arrow of time found in quantum gravity is at best de facto (nonlawlike).

In Grünbaum (1989, 374, 390), I objected to Narlikar's (1977, 136–137) designation “event of ‘creation’” for a supposed first cosmic instant t = 0, which he imports into the big bang cosmology of the general theory of relativity (GTR). Narlikar (1992, 361–362) does reject a theological construal of the “creation”. But, endeavoring to justify his secular creationism, he now points out that, in the GTR, the usual derivation of matter-energy conservation from Hilbert's stationary action principle cannot be extended to include the putative first instant t = 0. Narlikar reasons that this “breakdown” in the derivation of energy conservation at t = 0 qualifies the putative initial event as the “creation event”. I argue that this inference is multiply fallacious.

Alasdair MacIntyre's expression of the “profound gratitude we all owe to Althusser for having brought French Marxism back into dialogue with the rest of French philosophy” (as quoted by Elliott in his introduction to the selection under discussion, 1990, xi), important as it may be for a host of reasons, did not try to make Althusser's philosophy particularly attractive to philosophers of science. However, the present selection of essays does precisely this: It is almost ideally designed to mark the beginnings of an effective encounter of this particular brand of “French Marxism” with philosophy of science.