What's right with a syntactic approach to theories and models?
| Abstract | I argue that, contrary to common opinion, (i) unintended models do not pose a significant problem for syntactic approaches to scientific theories, (ii) in syntactic approaches, scientific theories can be as well connected to the world as in semantic ones, and (iii) some syntactic approaches are at least as language independent as semantic ones. Based on these results, I argue that syntactic and semantic approaches fare equally well when it comes to (iv) capturing the theory-observation relation, (v) ease of application, and (vi) accommodating the use of models in the sciences. | |||||||||
| Keywords | syntactic approach syntactic view received view semantic approach semantic view structuralism scientific models formalization language independence | |||||||||
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