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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.

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Posts les plus consultés de ce blog

Review of "There Are No Such Things As Theories", by Steven French

In “There Are No Such Things As Theories”, Steven French defends that there are no such things as theories. This well-named book provides a careful review of a wide range of issues, ranging from the philosophy of science (the syntactic and semantic conceptions of scientific theories, fictionalism about scientific representation, theoretical equivalence, science in practice) to the philosophy of art, with a particular focus on the metaphysics of abstract objects, including fictions and works of art, and, of course, theories, so as to arrive at its provocative conclusion, which is roughly the following: scientific theories don’t really exist, but we can still make sense of ordinary discourse about scientific theories. I wasn’t convinced by this conclusion in the end, but I think that this is because I approach things very differently at the meta-philosophical level, and I am not particularly moved by metaphysical considerations in general (the ones signalled by the “really” emphasised...
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Reflections (1): on the practical equivalence between semantic and syntactic conceptions of theories

Having reviewed the work of the most influential authors on the syntactic and semantic views of theories (and having read a bunch of articles that I won’t review here), I guess it’s about time to give my own reflections on this debate. So, what is it all about? Are theories statements about the world, or are they families of models? Or something else entirely? As my draft was becoming very long, I decided to cut these reflections into several parts. Today, I will argue that there are no differences of grain in the way the two views can individuate theories, so that the difference must lie somewhere else: in the way theories are interpreted. Tomorrow, I will examine and debunk an idea: that the semantic view is about there being various more or less abstract levels of representation in science, with models playing an intermediary role between statements and phenomena: this cannot be the claim. The day after I will examine a better idea: that it's all about representation in s...
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Reflections (4): Scientific representation is piecemeal

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...
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