This paper argues against the view that the standard explanation of phase transitions in statistical mechanics may be considered a causal explanation, a distortion that can nevertheless successfully represent causal relations.

In the course of the discussion, Professor Quine pinpoints the difficulties involved in translation, brings to light the anomalies and conflicts implicit in our ...

We develop positive model theory, which is a non first order analogue of classical model theory where compactness is kept at the expense of negation. The analogue of a first order theory in this framework is a compact abstract theory: several equivalent yet conceptually different presentations of this notion are given. We prove in particular that Banach and Hilbert spaces are compact abstract theories, and in fact very well-behaved as such.