Abstract

For this, the second of four volumes comprising the papers submitted for publication by the invited participants to the Fifth International Congress of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, held at the University of Western Ontario in 1975, the editors have selected papers concerned with "foundational problems" in the physical sciences, biology, psychology, and the social sciences. In spite of the wide range of papers included in the volume, the reader never learns exactly what constitutes a foundational problem in the philosophy of science. Would it be reasonable to suppose that foundational problems focus upon the basic logical, epistemological, and metaphysical issues posed by the special sciences, to the exclusion of purely methodological and strictly historical issues? In fact, the contributions to this volume cover the entire scope of metaphysical, epistemological, logical, methodological, historical, and quasi-historical questions that are conventionally classified under the philosophy of science in contemporary academic discourse. There are essays on the genesis of the universe, the methodology of physics, and quantum mechanics; essays on various topics in the philosophy of biology—including the ontological status of species, theories and observation in developmental biology, determinism and teleology, and genetic information; essays on problems in the philosophy of psychology-including consciousness and the brain, causality and action, and methodological problems in the investigation of human activity; three essays on learning theory; and several essays on problems in the philosophy of social science—including methodology, axiological problems, and four papers on the concept of rationality which are principally concerned with J. Harsanyi’s researches on the contribution of Bayesian decision theory and recent developments in game theory to the understanding of rational behavior.