Models as Mediators, edited by Mary Morgan and Margaret Morrison (so many Ms!), is a collective book from 1999 that has now become kind of a classic for whoever is interested in modelling activities in science. It played an important role in impulsing a trend in philosophy of science that consists in focusing more on modelling activities, considered scientifically important for their own sake, and less on the content of abstract theories (a trend that arguably started earlier, in particular with Nancy Cartwright’s work, who contributed to the book, and also perhaps even earlier with Mary Hesse, cited in the introduction). This book is somehow relevant for my project of discussing how a pragmatic conception of theories could fare better than a semantic conception, because, as we will see, it opposes, or at least attempts to supersede the semantic conception of theories in some respects. However, it is also partly irrelevant to my project, because my main focus is still on abstract ...
After Suppe and van Fraassen, we’re now reaching the last defender of the semantic conception of theories that I will comment on: Ronald Giere. I’m particularly interested in his work, because he takes a much more pragmatic stance that the others, who remain generally more structuralist, and I think I can find much in common with my own stance. I will comment on chapter 3 of his “Explaining science” (1988), chapters 5 and 6 of “Science without Laws” (1999) and chapter 4 of “Scientific Perspectivism” (2006). Summary of Explaining Science In “Explaining Science”, Giere tells us: in order to know what a theory is, instead of looking at abstract theoretical reconstructions of their content by philosophers, we can simply have a look at science textbooks. It would be presomptuous to claim that their authors and users do not know what a theory is. And if we do so (he takes a few textbooks of classical mechanics as illustration), what we observe is that indeed, a system of laws is present...