Foundational Problems in the Special Sciences

The Fifth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science was held at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada, 27 August to 2 September 1975. The Congress was held under the auspices of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science, Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, and was sponsored by the National Research Council of Canada and the University of Western Ontario. As those associated closely with the work of the Division over the years know weIl, the work undertaken by its members varies greatly and spans a number of fields not always obviously related. In addition, the volume of work done by first rate scholars and scientists in the various fields of the Division has risen enormously. For these and related reasons it seemed to the editors chosen by the Divisional officers that the usual format of publishing the proceedings of the Congress be abandoned in favour of a somewhat more flexible, and hopefully acceptable, method of pre­ sentation. Accordingly, the work of the invited participants to the Congress has been divided into four volumes appearing in the University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science. The volumes are entitled, Logic, Foundations of Mathematics and Computability Theory, Foun­ dational Problems in the Special Sciences, Basic Problems in Methodol­ ogy and Linguistics, and Historical and Philosophical Dimensions of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science.

Jaakko Hintikka is the author or co-author of thirty volumes and of some 300 scholarly articles in mathematical and philosophical logic, epistemology, language theory, philosophy of science, history of ideas and history of philosophy, including Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Peirce, The Bloomsbury Group, Husserl and Wittgenstein. He has also been active in international scholarly organizations, most recently as the First Vice-President of FISP, Vice-President of IIP and Co-Chair of the American Organizing Committee of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal Synthese and the Managing Editor of Synthese Library since 1965.

I/Foundations of The Physical Sciences.- Genesis and Observership.- The Methodology of Physics and Topology.- Axiomatics and the Search for the Foundations of Physics.- II/The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.- What is Philosophically Interesting about Quantum Mechanics?.- Completeness and Realism in Quantum Mechanics.- III/Foundations of biology.- The Ontological Status of Species as Evolutionary Units.- Theories and Observations of Developmental Biology.- Organic Determinism and Teleology in Biological Research.- Explicit and Implicit Semantic Content of the Genetic Information.- IV/Foundations of Psychology.- Consciousness and the Brain.- Causality and Action.- Methodological Aspects of Analysis of Activity.- V/The Status of Learning Theories.- A Survey of Contemporary Learning Theories.- Conditioning as the Perception of Causal Relations.- Leanable Functions.- VI/Foundations of The Social Sciences.- The Methodology of Social Knowledge and the Problem of the Integration of the Sciences.- VII/Justice and Social Change.- Welfare Inequalities and Rawlsian Axiomatics.- Nonlinear Social Welfare Functions: A Rejoinder to Prof. Sen.- Non Linear Social Welfare Functions: A Reply to Prof. Harsanyi.- The Measurement of Social Inequality.- VIII/Rationality in Social Sciences.- Advances in Understanding Rational Behavior.- Towards a Unified Decision Theory: A Non-Bayesian Approach.- On the Rationale of the Bayesian Approach: Comments on Prof. Watkins's Paper.- The Dual Function of Rationality.- Index of Names.