Critical Notice of Paul Thomson's "The Structure of Biological Theories"

Abstract

In this critical notice, I argue that the semantic view championed by Thompson no logical advantage over the syntactic view of theories, especially in the area of interpretation. Each weakness of the syntactic view has a corresponding weakness in the semantic view. In principle the two are not different in power, but it is sometimes better to adopt one rather than the other, for practical reasons. I agree with Thompson that many issues in the philosophy of biology can be illuminated by the semantic view, but that other things, especially deriving specific prediction, are best understood with the syntactic view.