| This thesis is about how we view scientific theories. For the best part of the last century the dominant philosophical view has been the syntactic view that scientific theories are logically deduced from some universal law(s) and some axioms. This view has been held by realists, who hold that theories accurately describe the way the world is, and by instrumentalists, who deny this claim and hold that theories have only to be instrumentally useful. This status quo has been challenged by the semantic view, which claims that a scientific theory is a set theoretical predicate used to define a family of models which allow us to represent aspects of the world.;The semantic view does not permit us to maintain a correspondence view of truth. I conclude by showing how a version of Simon Blackburn's projectivism allows the semantic view to make truth claims about the world without requiring the realist metaphysic, thus showing that the semantic view of scientific theories can account for the apparent realism in science.;In this dissertation I show that the syntactic view has many difficulties which render problematic any view of scientific theories which must at the same time be realist, coherent and descriptively adequate. I present a version of the semantic view of scientific theories as an alternative to the syntactic view. For another alternative to the realist/instrumentalist view I examine Nancy Cartwright's view that science involves the construction of nomological machines. I show that the semantic view is at least as descriptively adequate as Cartwright's view in describing "hard" science and that it is better able to describe evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. |
