PREFACE 



concept of life, with its associated problems of mechanism, 

 vitalism, and teleology; of the concept of society, and all 

 of the problems of value which it raises; of the concept of 

 consciousness, with its important problem of behaviorism 

 versus introspectionism ; and so on, perhaps even through 

 the special concepts of economics, political science, law, 

 religion, and art. It hardly seems the function of a general 

 textbook in the philosophy of science to deal with problems 

 of such scope. 



Furthermore, the material has been chosen so as to make 

 it extremely unlikely that the book would overlap with any 

 of the texts in "introduction to philosophy by way of the 

 sciences." Courses centering about such books have a 

 definite function in the curriculum and there has been no 

 intention of replacing them by alternative approaches. 

 Survey courses of this kind pay much more attention to the 

 subject matter of science than does the present book. The 

 attempt has been made in the following pages to acquaint 

 the student not so much with the facts of science as with 

 the foundations of science. What is required for the philos- 

 ophy of science, as Russell points out, is knowledge not of 

 the complex features of science but of its abstract features — 

 a knowledge of its first chapters rather than of its last 

 chapters. This fact has permitted the elimination of many 

 of the highly complex illustrations, particularly those drawn 

 from relativity and quantum mechanics, which have ob- 

 scured much of the literature in the field for the non-tech- 

 nical reader. Except in connection with the analysis of the 

 basic concepts, where reference to the more complicated 

 problems is unavoidable, illustrative material has been 

 drawn from the more elemental theories, comprehensible to 

 the average reader. It seems likely that the important 

 philosophical features of science are located in the problems 

 which the scientist finds wherever he turns his head — in 

 classification, measurement, observation, hypothesis-forma- 

 tion, and so on — rather than in the comparatively rare 

 problems associated with advanced sciences. 



