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Soazig Le Bihan Sawyier Pre-Doctoral Fellow Department of Philosophy Illinois Institute of Technology January 22, 2008 Tuesday, 3:30pm-5:00pm HU Classroom 202 The main aim of the proponents of the semantic view is to focus philosophy of science on its proper domain, i.e., scientific theories as constructed, used and tested in actual practice. Advocates of the semantic turn claim that a focus on models allows them to give an account of scientific theories which is both formal and adequate to actual practice. Within the semantic conception, a theory is conceived as the family of models of its possible formulations. At least two kinds of objections have been leveled against the semantic view in the recent literature. First, critics of the semantic view of scientific theories argue that the identification of models as used in scientific practice with models in the model-theoretic sense is not tenable. Second, it has been shown that some traditional issues of the philosophy of science cannot be addressed by the semantic view. In particular, the apparatus of the semantic view fails to properly identify theories and to address the question of representation. If these criticisms stand, then the semantic view is simply untenable. I argue that these criticisms are problematic for the semantic view only under a strong interpretation of the semantic view, an interpretation which is arguably unfaithful to the initial project as defined and developed by Suppes. I propose an alternative interpretation according to which the semantic view is a methodological prescription for using model theory for the formal analysis of a hierarchy of models used in scientific practice. Under this interpretation, the semantic view is not only tenable, but also provides a promising research program for philosophy of science.  |
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