New account of empirical claims in structuralism

Abstract

In this paper, a new account of empirical claims in structuralism is developed. Its novelty derives from the use that is made of the linguistic approach to scientific theories despite the presumed incompatibility of structuralism with that approach. It is shown how the linguistic approach can be applied to the framework of structuralism if the semantic foundations of that approach are refined to do justice to the doctrine of indirect interpretation of theoretical terms. This doctrine goes back to Carnap but has been advanced until the present day without a proper semantic explanation.

Taming conceptual wanderings: Wilson-Structuralism

“…This modified Structuralism joins other recent attempts of renewing classical Structuralism by simplifying and improving its behemothic framework. Andreas' "Carnapian Structuralism" (Andreas 2010(Andreas , 2014 is an example of a kind of Structuralism more compatible with other contemporary philosophical views about scientific theories reconstruction. Carnapian Structuralism restyled the structuralist framework through a reader-friendly system of postulates built around the notion of a theoretical expansion of a partial potential model.…”

Anti-essentialism, modal relativity, and alternative material-origin counterfactuals

“…Gametes, being theoretical posits of which are aware only against the backdrop of biological theory, are referred to by theoretical terms. And theoretical terms are best interpreted, in the Ramsey-Carnap-Lewis tradition, not as names (MacBride and Janssen-Lauret 2015, p. 298) or reference-fixing descriptions (Strevens 2012), but as expressions which capture a theoretical role descriptively (Andreas 2010; Janssen-Lauret and MacBride 2020a, b).…”

A Structuralist Theory of Belief Revision

“…Classical structuralism, as expounded in Balzer et al (1987), may further be seen as the most thorough elaboration of the semantic view of scientific theories, i.e., the view that the models of a scientific theory are essential for its identity. This semantic orientation does not necessarily preclude the representation of deductive and other forms of reasoning because it has been shown how the structuralist representation scheme can be transformed into an axiomatic representation of scientific theories in the style of a more Carnapian and hence more syntactic conception of scientific theories (Andreas 2010b). The surplus of this transformation is the formal representation of deductive reasoning, which was not available in classical structuralism.…”

“…Classical structuralism, because of its semantic orientation, does not have the resources to account for deductive and other forms of reasoning with the help of a scientific theory. It has been shown, however, how the structuralist representation scheme can be transformed into an axiomatic representation of scientific theories (Andreas 2010b).…”