We respect Herbert A. Simon as an established leader of empirical and logical analysis in the human sciences while we happily think of him as also the loner; of course he works with many colleagues but none can match him. He has been writing fruitfully and steadily for four decades in many fields, among them psychology, logic, decision theory, economics, computer science, management, production engineering, information and control theory, operations research, confirmation theory, and we must have omitted several. With all (...) of them, he is at once the technical scientist and the philosophical critic and analyst. When writing of decisions and actions, he is at the interface of philosophy of science, decision theory, philosophy of the specific social sciences, and inventory theory. When writing on causality, he is at the interface of methodology, metaphysics, logic and philosophy of physics, systems theory, and so on. Not that the interdisciplinary is his orthodoxy; we are delighted that he has chosen to include in this book both his early and little-appreciated treatment of straightforward philosophy of physics - the axioms of Newtonian mechanics, and also his fine papers on pure confirmation theory. (shrink)

S CIENTISTS often claim that an experiment or observation tests certain hypotheses within a complex theory but not others. Relativity theorists, for example, are unanimous in the judgment that measurements of the gravitational red shift do not test the field equations of general relativity; psychoanalysts sometimes complain that experimental tests of Freudian theory are at best tests of rather peripheral hypotheses; astronomers do not regard observations of the positions of a single planet as a test of Kepler's third law, even (...) though those observations may test Kepler's first and second laws. Observations are regarded as relevant to some hypotheses in a theory but not relevant to others in that same theory. There is another kind of scientific judgment that may or may not be related to such judgments of relevance: determinations of the accuracy of the predictions of some theories are not held to provide tests of those theories, or, at least, positive results are not held to support or confirm the theories in question. There are, for example, special relativistic theories of gravity that predict the same phenomena as does general relativity, yet the theories are regarded as.. (shrink)

A classical problem in the philosophy of science is the characterization of the purposes served by theoretical terms in scientific theories. Closely associated with this is the question whether theoretical terms can always be eliminated from scientific theories without loss of the essential purposes served by these terms. If they can, then the empiricist has gained a potential argument against scientific realism. I consider the success of elimination strategies with respect to three minimal constraints: the replacement theory must be axiomatizable (...) , the empirical content of the replacement must coincide with the empirical content of the original, and the replacement must be at least as well tested as the original theory. If elimination strategies prove unsuccessful with respect to some constraint, then not only is the potential anti-realist argument blocked, but a positive function of theoretical terms is thereby identified. ;The dialectic of the dissertation proceeds by taking successively more plausible representations of empirical content. If the empirical content of a theory is taken to be the set of its consequences in the observation language, then Craig's reaxiomatization procedure generates an elimination strategy that trivially satisfies and . I argue, despite counter claims, that it satisfies as well. ;From a semantic viewpoint, however, the empirical content of a theory should coincide with the class of observable configurations permitted by the theory. A first approximation to this idea is obtained by taking the class of reducts with respect to the observation language of the models of the theory. This class need not be elementary in the wider sense, and hence cannot be defined in terms of the observation vocabulary. This possibility raises two questions. Are any known scientific theories of this sort? In this vein I defeat Sneed's conjecture that "mass" is not semantically eliminable from classical mechanics. Can methodological constraints that ensure semantic eliminability be invoked? Simon and Groen have proposed such a constraint. I argue, however, that it is an unreasonable one. ;Regardless, this representation of empirical content is inadequate since a given reduct of a model of a theory may still contain unobservable individuals and states of affairs. This problem is rectified by identifying empirical content with the class obtained by taking as elements the set of observable facts of each model of the theory. These sets may or may not yield structures for the observation language. Even if they do, then the obtained class need not be elementary in the wider sense in the observation language, the set of sentences true in it may be distinct from the set of the theory's consequences in the observation language, and the set of sentences true in it cannot be shown to be axiomatizable. In any event, it is clear that there can be no general elimination strategy that produces a replacement theory in the observation languages and yields only the class of sets of observable facts permitted by the theory. (shrink)