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...
The next stage of our journey is van Fraassen’s presentations of the semantic conception of theories. I will focus here mainly on parts of chapter 8 and chapter 9 of his “Laws and Symmetry” (1989), as well as the appendix of chapter 1 in his “Scientific Representation” (2008), and to a less extent his 1970 article “On the Extension of Beth’s Semantics of Physical Theories”. I will also mention in passing a presentation by Thompson “Formalisations of Evolutionary Biology” that is cited favourably in Scientific Representation. Summary of the material Laws and Symmetries is largely concerned with giving an account of theoretical laws that does not take them to represent real aspects of nature (actual laws), but to be mere structural features of our representation of nature, characterised in particular by symmetries. Laws are laws of models only, and it is ultimately the content of these models, not their overarching structure, that is supposed to be adequate. As we can see, the whole p...