Abstract
There is a very general question in the philosophy of science. It is this: how do we think our theories represent the world? What is theoretical knowledge in the sciences, knowledge of? One very influential answer to this question is the thesis of Structuralism: theoretical knowledge is not knowledge of unobservable objects and the hidden relations among them but is always and only knowledge of structure.
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See (Ladyman and Ross, 2007). These are the main authors. The volume also contains contributions jointly written with James Ladyman and Dan Ross by David Spurrett and John Collier.
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Thus they say explicitly, “It is not part of our realism that every time a scientist quantifies over something in formulation of a theory or hypothesis she is staking out an existential commitment …. Indeed, we will argue that, semantic appearances notwithstanding, we should not interpret science—either fundamental physics or special sciences—as metaphysically committed to the existence of self-subsistent individuals” (Ladyman and Ross, 2007, p. 119).
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Kuhn loss was the supposed historical phenomenon that the explanatory successes of earlier theories at the level of successful predictions would fail to be captured by succeeding theories.
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Van Fraassen in an excellent recent reply to structuralism (van Fraassen, 2006), gives a nice example of how observations reveal the structure of the phenomena behind them without revealing the qualities and inner nature of that hidden reality. His example is based on one provided by Russell in (Russell, 1927). Van Fraassen writes: “Listen to the radio, and hear the sounds which were produced in the studio many miles away. In between are the radio waves which have none of the qualities of sound. But we can infer that they must have structure which encodes the structure of this sound. Thus we know a great deal about those radio waves on the basis of observation: not what qualities they have or what they are like in themselves, but their structure. And it’s precisely that, and only that, which science describes (as it happens of course what Maxwell’s equations describe)”(p. 289).
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The proof is straightforward. If an observation sentence O is not a consequence of T then some interpretation I of T satisfies T but fails to satisfy O. But then that same interpretation will satisfy R(T), since R(T) is merely an existential generalisation of some predicates in T, but will fail to satisfy O. So if O is a consequence of R(T) then it must be a consequence of T by contraposition. Similarly if O is not a consequence of R(T), then some interpretation of the existentially generalised predicates of T satisfies R(T) but fails to satisfy O. Precisely that interpretation of the predicates of T will then provide an interpretation of T itself which satisfies T but fails to satisfy O. Hence by contraposition if O is a consequence of T, O is a consequence of R(T). So as far as O-consequences are concerned T and R(T) are equivalent.
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Van Fraassen makes a closely related point. He puts the matter forcefully as follows: “if structure is not just there as mathematical or abstract entity, then it is not true that structure is all there is” (van Fraassen, 2006, p. 294).
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Clark, P. (2011). Scientific Knowledge and Structural Knowledge. In: DeVidi, D., Hallett, M., Clarke, P. (eds) Logic, Mathematics, Philosophy, Vintage Enthusiasms. The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 75. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0214-1_24
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