Here are our conclusions so far: what the semantic conception of theories claims is that a theory provides us with a certain family of representational vehicles that are non-linguistic in nature, its models; however, the idea that representation in science is non-linguistic is unwarranted: for sure, the informal features of experimentation and the contextual nature of idealisations are hard to address using the correspondence rules put forth by logical empiricists, but this seems to point to a more pragmatic conception of linguistic interpretation, not to the idea that representation would be structural instead of linguistic. Having said that, I think that there is still a grain of truth in the semantic view, which is the following: Theories do not represent or describe nature directly as a whole. They are used to build models that represent it piecemeal. This, I take it, is an assumption that is shared by semantic and pragmatist conceptions of theories, and that is rather at odds...
We have now settled, in conclusion of the previous article, on the most sensible interpretation of the semantic view: not a difference of grain in theory identification, not the idea that there are different levels of abstraction with models lying in between abstract theories and experience, but simply the idea that scientific representation isn’t linguistic at all. My understanding of this is the following: for the semantic view, a theory provides us not with literal descriptions of nature, but with a certain way of representing the world, or a certain kind or family of representational vehicles, its models, which are non-linguistic in nature, and which play a central role in science, a role that was neglected by syntacticists. Of course, the theory itself (as well as its models) are expressed by means of linguistic/mathematical formula, but these formula shouldn’t be taken to describe nature directly. There’s an intermediate level, constituted by the models. And the way models repr...