Abstract
The word ‘theory,’ like ‘hypothesis’ and ‘law,’ is used quite ambiguously. Sometimes its sense is almost synonymous with ‘hypothesis’ in its ordinary meaning as when we say “that is sheer theory,” or when we speak of the nebular hypothesis and mean the nebular theory. Again the word is used in place of ‘law’ as when we speak of the theory of gravitation and mean simply the law of attraction. It is not my intention to try to explicate all these nor to give a meaning of ‘theory’ that will cover all shades. I want to discuss the term when it is used to refer to such things as the heliocentric theory of planetary motion or the atomic theory of matter, or the theory of magnetism, and so on. These appear to me to be closer to the usage of the term in scientific discourse. At any rate it should help in seeing the relation of the language to what it talks about if we analyze the word in such usages.
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Bibliography
Max Born, Experiment and Theory in Physics (Cambridge, Eng.: The University Press, 1943.
R. B. Braithwaite, Scientific Explanation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), Chapters III, IV, pp. 22–115.
P. W. Bridgman, Nature of Physical Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1936).
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S. Toulmin, Philosophy of Science (London: Hutchinson’s House, 1953), Chapter IV, pp. 105–140; treats theories as analagous to maps.
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© 1957 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Kattsoff, L.O. (1957). The Structure of Theories. In: Physical Science and Physical Reality. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-6048-5_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-6048-5_11
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