Sapp's Scientific Theory Of Semantic Concept Study

Nowadays, The semantic conception of scientific theories is the main opponent to thelogical positivism's 'The Received View'. Thereinto, Suppe's 'quasi-realism' ofsemantic conception has its bright characteristic and exploits a new genre of semanticconception. As one of the three genres of semantic conception(the others are Suppes's"structuralism" and Van Fraassen's "constructive empiricism"), the semanticconception of 'quasi-realism' influences the domain of the philosophy of scienceconsiderably.This article focus on three facets of Suppe's semantic conception: the criticismand recapitulation to 'The Received View', the content of Suppe's semanticconception includes and the deficiency of Suppe's semantic conception reveals.The criticism from Suppe to 'The received View' is weak. On partialinterpretation, Suppe considered that it supposed the dual observational/theoreticaldichotomy beforehand. And the observational/theoretical dichotomy included theentity and attribute dichotomy and the term dichotomy. In natural language, thedistinction between observational and theoretical was impossible. While in artificial orreconstructed language it might be possible, but it was too hard. Suppe argued that theobservational/theoretical distinction was not necessary as we could reconstruct thetheories felicitously without the assistance from the distinction between observationaland theoretical. Therefore, The Received View might be discarded.The reconstruction Suppe presented was a kind of semantic conception—thesemantic conception of 'quasi-realism'. The main feature of Suppe's semanticconception of 'quasi-realism' are: First, theory is a relational system consist of thecollections of states and laws; second, theory describes the phenomenacounterfactually. The latter incarnates the conception of 'quasi-realism', whichprovides a new philosophic analysis to the relation between theory and phenomena. Itmakes clear that theory can not describe all the feature of phenomena, but part offeature instead. Hence, theory describes the phenomena counterfactually. Suppe's semantic conception was oppugned as time went by. First, is theoryequal with models? Second, is meta-mathematical model the unique form of scientificmodel? Third, the idealization is considered uncompatible with his 'quasi-realism'.How to deal with this problems is a challenge for Suppe.