Whether meaning is compositional has been a major issue in linguistics and formal philosophy of language for the last 2 decades. Semantic holism is widely and plausibly considered as an objection to the principle of semantic compositionality therein. It comes as a surprise that the holistic peculiarities of scientific language have been rarely addressed in formal accounts so far, given that semantic holism has its roots in the philosophy of science. For this reason, a model-theoretic approach to semantic holism in (...) the language of science is presented here. This approach preserves compositionality to a large extent. *Received September 2009; revised February 2010. †To contact the author, please write to: Seminar for Philosophy, Logic, and Theory of Science, Hauspostfach 49, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich 80539, Germany; e-mail: holger.andreas@lrz.uni-muenchen.de. (shrink)

The connection between scientific knowledge and our empirical access to realityis not well explained within the structuralist approach to scientific theories. I arguethat this is due to the use of a semantics not rich enough from the philosophical pointof view. My proposal is to employ Sellars–Brandom's inferential semantics to understand how can scientific terms have empirical content, and Hintikka's game-theoretical semantics to analyse how can theories be empirically tested. The main conclusions are that scientific concepts gain their meaning through `basic (...) theories' grounded on `common sense, and that scientific method usually allows the pragmatic verification and falsification of scientific theories. (shrink)

"To my knowledge, there has never [before] been a volume that analyzes, in one place, the actual language of science--those elements of thinking that are acknowledged to be the basis of scientific thought. . . . [Thus] this is a very important book, contributing to several fields: science, education, rhetoric, medicine, and perhaps even philosophy. . . . Darian's erudition is truly astonishing." --Celest A. Martin, Associate Professor, College Writing Program, University of Rhode Island From astronomy to zoology, the practice (...) of science proceeds from scientific ways of thinking. These patterns of thought, such as defining and classifying, hypothesizing and experimenting, form the building blocks of all scientific endeavor. Understanding how they work is therefore an essential foundation for everyone involved in scientific study or teaching, from elementary school students to classroom teachers and professional scientists. In this book, Steven Darian examines the language of science in order to analyze the patterns of thinking that underlie scientific endeavor. He draws examples from university science textbooks in a variety of disciplines, since these offer a common, even canonical, language for scientific expression. Darian identifies and focuses in depth on nine patterns--defining, classifying, using figurative language, determining cause and effect, hypothesizing, experimenting, visualizing, quantifying, and comparing--and shows how they interact in practice. He also traces how these thought modes developed historically from Pythagoras through Newton. (shrink)

Robert Proctor has argued that ignorance or non-knowledge can be fruitfully divided into at least three categories: (1) ignorance as native state or starting point; (2) ignorance as lost realm or selective choice; and (3) ignorance as strategic ploy or active construct. This chapter explores Proctor’s second category, ignorance as selective choice. When scientists investigate poorly understood phenomena, they have to make selective choices about what questions to ask, what research strategies and metrics to employ, and what language to use (...) for describing the phenomena. This chapter focuses especially on the selective choice of language for describing and categorizing phenomena in the face of uncertainty. Using several case studies from recent pollution research, I show that linguistic choices are especially significant when we have severely limited knowledge, because those choices can emphasize and highlight some aspects of our limited knowledge rather than others. These selective emphases can in turn influence societal decision making, and they can exacerbate the selectivity of our knowledge by further steering scientific research in some directions rather than others. I conclude with some suggestions for developing scientific language in socially responsible ways, even in the face of significant ignorance and uncertainty. (shrink)

Interpretation in science has gained little attention in the past because philosophers of science believed that interpretation belongs to the context of discovery or must be associated with meaning. But scientists often speak about interpretation when they report their findings. Elsewhere I have argue in favour of a pragmatic-rhetorical theory of explanation, and it is in light of this theory that I suggest we can understand interpretation in the natural sciences.

The syntax of Frege's scientific language iscommonly taken to be characterized by two oddities:the representation of the intended illocutionary roleof sentences by a special sign, the judgement-stroke,and the treatment of sentences as a species ofsingular terms. In this paper, an alternative view isdefended. The main theses are: (i) the syntax ofFrege's scientific language aims at an explication ofthe logical form of judgements; (ii) thejudgement-stroke is, therefore, a truth-operator, nota pragmatic operator; (iii) in Frege's first system,` ' expresses that the circumstance (...) is a fact, and in his second system that thetruth-value - is the True; (iv) in bothsystems, the judgement-stroke is construed as a signsui generis, not as a genuine predicate; (v) itscounterpart in natural language is the syntactic ``formof assertoric sentences'', not the (redundant)truth-predicate; (vi) neither in Frege's first nor inhis second system sentences are treated as singular terms. (shrink)

I consider three aspects in which machine learning and philosophy of science can illuminate each other: methodology, inductive simplicity and theoretical terms. I examine the relations between the two subjects and conclude by claiming these relations to be very close.

It is a popular view amongst some philosophers, most notably those with Quinean views about ontological commitment, that scientific theories are first-orderizable; that we can regiment all such theories in an extensional first-order language. I argue that this view is false, and that any acceptable account of science needs to take some modal notion as primitive.

The article argues for the possibility of translation manuals having an implicit internal structure. This structure is composed of specific methodological assumptions and techniques. Using the (N)-type and (G)-type distinction developed by Fuller for the study of scientific behavior, it is shown that these are incomplete characterizations of translation manuals. A more complete characterization must involve an analysis of how the presence or absence of methodological rules influences the interpretation of specific research questions. It is further argued that while Quine's (...) original indeterminacy thesis cannot be completely rejected, in some cases it can be modified to reflect the importance of the methodological constraints. Finally, it is suggested that the more critical analysis of translation manuals will benefit the on-going debates in the study of scientific behavior. (shrink)