The Pragmatic Conception of Scientific Theories

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...

Let’s continue our investigation on semantic conceptions of scientific theories with a review of Suppe’s well named “The Semantic Conception of Scientific Theories and Scientific Realism” from 1989. Summary of the Book The book starts with a helpful prologue that gives some historical context: how the semantic conception came about, roughly from philosophers with a scientific training interested in elucidating the structure of scientific theories, but unsatisfied with positivist reconstructions. The first chapter deals precisely with what, according to Suppe, is problematic with the old “syntactic view”. I found the succint presentation of it helpful. For the record (and even more succintely), this is the idea that, assuming a language for science: One can distinguish observational and theoretical terms The observation language is a language without quantification using only observational terms (merely describing individual facts for observation reports) Only this observation ...

Summary of the programme Along with the infamous semantic conception of theories (of which it can be considered part), the structuralist programme wants to analyse scientific theories in set-theoretic terms rather than in logico-linguistic terms. In other words, theories are not axiomatic systems, but set-theoretical structures. As stated in the introduction of the book, the program is not against the idea that theoretical knowledge is propositional in nature. Their understanding of structure is: how different pieces of propositional knowledge hang together. So, we should have this idea, I guess, that theories somehow organise propositional knowledge in a structural form, and their aim is to elucidate this structure in full generality. Models Just as more mainstream presentations of the semantic conception (by Suppe, Giere, van Fraassen), they take theories to be families of model. But we will see that they want it to have a bit more internal structure than this. What is a model ...

My current research project consists in developing a pragmatist conception of scientific theories that could compete with the now mainstream semantic conceptions of theories. I characterise a pragmatic conception in terms of the fact that it does not abstract away users and application contexts when analysing the content of theories. My methods to develop such a conception is by importing tools from the philosophy of language, notably hyperintensional notions of aboutness. This blog is dedicated to make public my advances in the project: first this will be mostly reading notes with comments, and then perhaps more substantial reflections.