Abstract
Throughout the history of the philosophy of science, theories have been linked to formulas as a privileged representational format. In this paper, following [8], I defend a semantic-representational conception of theories, where theories are identified with sets of scientific re-presentations by virtue of their epistemic potential and independently of their format. To show the potential of this proposal, I analyze as a case study the use of phase diagrams in statistical mechanics to convey in a semantically consistent and syntactically correct way theoretical principles such as Liouville’s theorem. I conclude by defending this philosophical position as a tool to show the enormous representational richness underlying scientific practices.
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Anta, J. (2021). Diagrams as Part of Physical Theories: A Representational Conception. In: Basu, A., Stapleton, G., Linker, S., Legg, C., Manalo, E., Viana, P. (eds) Diagrammatic Representation and Inference. Diagrams 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12909. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86062-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86062-2_5
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