At a time when computerized laboratory automation is producing a da ta explosion, chemists are turning to applied mathematics and statistics for the tools to extract useful chemical information from data. This rush to find applicable methods has lead to a somewhat confusing body of literature that represents a barrier to chemists wishing to learn more about chemometrics. The confusion results partly from the mixing of chemical notation and nomenclature with those of statistics, applied mathematics and engineering. Additionally, in the absence of collaboration with mathematicians, chemists...

We are grateful to the authors who wrote papers specially for this volume and kindly gave their permission for printing them together. None of these papers appeared anywhere before. Our special thanks are due to the first six authors who kindly responded to our request and agreed to join this new venture which we are calling 'comparative perspective' in ana- lytical philosophy. In the introductory essay certain salient points from each paper have been noted only to show how 'com- parative perspective' may add to, and be integrated with, mod- ern philosophical discussion in the analytic...

cake, even though it is typically given the pride of place in expositions in Frege's semantics. As a part of this attempted reversal of emphasis, Jaakko Hintikka has also called attention to the role Frege played in convincing almost everyone that verbs for being had to be treated as multiply ambiguous between the "is" of identity, the "is" of predication, the "is" of existence, and the "is" of class-inclusion - a view that had been embraced by few major figures (if any) before Frege, with the exception of John Stuart Mill and Augustus De Morgan. Hintikka has gone on to challenge this...

Hilbert's Program was founded on a concern for the phenomenon of paradox in mathematics. To Hilbert, the paradoxes, which are at once both absurd and irresistible, revealed a deep philosophical truth: namely, that there is a discrepancy between the laws accord ing to which the mind of homo mathematicus works, and the laws governing objective mathematical fact. Mathematical epistemology is, therefore, to be seen as a struggle between a mind that naturally works in one way and a reality that works in another. Knowledge occurs when the two cooperate. Conceived in this way, there are two basic...

The modern discussion on the concept of truthlikeness was started in 1960. In his influential Word and Object, W. V. O. Quine argued that Charles Peirce's definition of truth as the limit of inquiry is faulty for the reason that the notion 'nearer than' is only "defined for numbers and not for theories." In his contribution to the 1960 International Congress for Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science at Stan- ford, Karl Popper defended the opposite view by defining a compara- tive notion of verisimilitude for theories. was originally introduced by the The concept of verisimilitude...

The near Infra-Red emission of the Interstellar Medium is a very puzzling subject. In the brightest regions, where spectroscopic observa tions are possible from the ground, several bands (3.3 - 3.4 - 6.2 - 7.7 - 8.6 - 11.3 m) have been observed since 1973. The absence of satisfying explanation was so obvious that they were called "Unidenti fied IR Emission Bands." The puzzle still increased when were known the first results of the general IR sky survey made by the satellite IRAS. On a large scale, the near IR emission of the Interstellar medium was expected to be very small but it was...

This book has grown out of eight years of close collaboration among its authors. From the very beginning we decided that its content should come out as the result of a truly common effort. That is, we did not "distribute" parts of the text planned to each one of us. On the contrary, we made a point that each single paragraph be the product of a common reflection. Genuine team-work is not as usual in philosophy as it is in other academic disciplines. We think, however, that this is more due to the idiosyncrasy of philosophers than to the nature of their subject. Close collaboration with...

How many miles to Babylon? Three-score and ten. Can I get there by candle-light? Yes, and back again. If your heels are nimble dnd light, You may get there by candle-light. Any philosopher who takes more than a fleeting interest in the sciences and their development must at some stage confront the issue of incommensurability in one or other of its many manifes- tations. For the philosopher of science concerned with problems of conceptual change and the growth of knowledge, matters of incommensurability are of paramount concern. After many years of skating over, skimming through and skirting...

This volume has its already distant or1g1n in an inter- national conference on Evolutionary Epistemology the editors organized at the University of Ghent in November 1984. This conference aimed to follow up the endeavor started at the ERISS (Epistemologically Relevant Internalist Sociology of Science) conference organized by Don Campbell and Alex Rosen- berg at Cazenovia Lake, New York, in June 1981, whilst in- jecting the gist of certain current continental intellectual developments into a debate whose focus, we thought, was in danger of being narrowed too much, considering the still...

The contributions to this special collection concern issues and problems discussed in or related to the work of Wesley C. Salmon. Salmon has long been noted for his important work in the philosophy of science, which has included research on the interpretation of probability, the nature of explanation, the character of reasoning, the justification of induction, the structure of space/time and the paradoxes of Zeno, to mention only some of the most prominent. During a time of increasing preoccupation with historical and sociological approaches to under standing science (which characterize...