This volume contains all the contributed papers presented at the nineteenth biennial meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association held in Austin, Texas, 18–20 November 2004.

Thanks are due to many people who made the meeting successful. Sandra Mitchell, PSA2002 Program Chair, generously helped with her recent experience and knowledge of PSA practices and customs. George Gale, PSA Secretary/Treasurer, coached us on procedures, opportunities and deadlines, and helped to plan the Presidential Reception. And Elliott Sober, PSA President 2003–2004, was active in advising me and the program committee throughout the process. I thank each of you for your support and counsel. Jay Malone in the HSS office provided assistance for registration and local arrangements.

The PSA2004 Program Committee worked diligently to select an excellent and balanced set of papers (59 out of 176 papers were accepted, or 34%). Each paper was refereed by at least two members of the Program Committee, and often comments were sent to authors. I thank each member of the Program Committee for their service to PSA: Christina Bicchieri, David Hilbert, Carl Hoefer, Harold Kincaid, Fred Kronz, Roberta Millstein, Alan Richardson, and Andrea Woody.

The online submission and evaluation software was managed by Temple University philosophy graduate student Micah Sparacio. Micah creatively adapted the program OpenConf to our needs and hosted the website. Thanks to Micah's expertise, the software operated with a minimum of glitches and no disasters. My thanks also to Susan Herbst, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Temple University, for allotting Micah a modest stipend for this work.

John Norton and John Earman supervised the archiving of papers at the PhilSci archive. All contributed papers could be read in advance of the meeting, and in advance of this journal issue, at http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/.

After PSA2004, Michael Dickson and his staff, Liz Stillwaggon and Holly Groover in the office of Philosophy of Science, took over the work of collection and final preparation of the papers for publication. I thank them for so seamlessly taking over the publication of the journal from the previous editor Noretta Koertge, and for expanding the scope of its operations to include so much of the editorial work for the PSA2004 volumes.

Finally, I thank the PSA for the opportunity to chair the PSA2004 Program Committee. It was a worthwhile, interesting experience. A full report of the work of the Program Committee, and its recommendations for future conferences, is available from me by request.

Miriam Solomon

Department of Philosophy, Temple University