ABSTRACT
This chapter argues against the mainstream of Whitehead scholarship. There is a standard story about the development of Whitehead's metaphysics which is not altogether incorrect, but it rests on a misunderstanding of his orientation on the scope and limits of philosophy. The chapter more thoroughly discusses how working hypotheses are adapted to their special topics in Whitehead's own inquiries. Whitehead uses the word "theory" o describe a working hypothesis when it is adjusted to the proper level of generality, and coordinated with the needed concepts for the purposes of a given inquiry. One might approach a defense of Whitehead's radical empiricism relative to any of a number of topics, but the authors restricts their demonstration to the issue of what Ford calls Whitehead's "discovery" of "temporal atomicity". There is radical empiricism of the sort that complex biological organisms with cultures and civilizations adopt for their own improvement, and then there is the radical empiricism that describes the real cosmos.
