The semantic view of theories is a position in the
philosophy of science
Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ult ...
that holds that a scientific theory can be identified with a collection of
models. The semantic view of theories was originally proposed by
Patrick Suppes
Patrick Colonel Suppes (; March 17, 1922 – November 17, 2014) was an American philosopher who made significant contributions to philosophy of science, the theory of measurement, the foundations of quantum mechanics, decision theory, psychology ...
in “A Comparison of the Meaning and Uses of Models in Mathematics and the Empirical Sciences” as a reaction against the
received view of theories The received view of theories is a position in the philosophy of science that identifies a scientific theory with a set of propositions which are considered to be linguistic objects, such as axioms. Frederick Suppe describes the position of the rec ...
popular among the
logical positivists. Many varieties of the semantic view propose identifying theories with a class of set-theoretic models in the
Tarskian sense, while others specify models in the mathematical language stipulated by the field of which the theory is a member.
Semantic vs. syntactic views of theories
The semantic view is typically contrasted with the syntactic view of theories of the logical positivists and logical empiricists, especially
Carl Gustav Hempel
Carl Gustav "Peter" Hempel (January 8, 1905 – November 9, 1997) was a German writer, philosopher, logician, and epistemologist. He was a major figure in logical empiricism, a 20th-century movement in the philosophy of science. He is esp ...
and
Rudolf Carnap. On the contrast between syntactic and semantic views,
Bas van Fraassen
Bastiaan Cornelis van Fraassen (; born 1941) is a Dutch-American philosopher noted for his contributions to philosophy of science, epistemology and formal logic. He is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University an ...
writes:
The syntactic picture of a theory identifies it with a body of theorems, stated in one particular language chosen for the expression of that theory. This should be contrasted with the alternative of presenting a theory in the first instance by identifying a class of structures as its models. In this second, semantic, approach the language used to express the theory is neither basic nor unique; the same class of structures could well be described in radically different ways, each with its own limitations. The models occupy central stage.
In this same book, van Fraassen, a key founder of the semantic view of theories, critiques the syntactic view in very strong terms:
Perhaps the worst consequence of the syntactic approach was the way it focused attention on philosophically irrelevant technical questions. It is hard not to conclude that those discussions of axiomatizability in restricted vocabularies, 'theoretical terms', Craig’s theorem, 'reduction sentences', 'empirical languages', Ramsey and Carnap sentences, were one and all off the mark—solutions to purely self-generated problems, and philosophically irrelevant. (p. 56)
The semantic view of theories has been extended to other domains, including population genetics.
[ Lloyd, EA. 1994. ''The Structure and Confirmation of Evolutionary Theory.'' Princeton University Press.]
See also
*
Structuralism (philosophy of science)
*
Frederick Suppe
Notes
External links
"The Semantic View of Theories: Models and Misconceptions"
Metatheory of science
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