Abstract
Perplexities concerning Scientific Theories persist because the usual ‘singled valued’ philosophical analyses cannot do justice to the problematic features of so complex a semantical entity. The components of theories are like law statements, and like models and hypotheses, being conceptual entities which are used in a variety of ways – not all of these being always compatible with the others. Thus many physicists characterize the classical laws of motion, as if they functioned in a definitional way. But sometimes these laws seem remarkably empirical. Others characterize such laws as ‘conventional’; they shape entire disciplines much as the rules shape the game of chess. Law statements are not exclusively any one of these – definitions, factual claims or conventions. They are all these things.
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Notes
- 1.
Kolin, and sometimes Poincaré, for example.
- 2.
Mach and Broad frame the Second Law as fundamentally a factual statement based on experience.
- 3.
Reichenbach, and Poincaré again, are cases in point.
- 4.
The temporal references, ‘before’ and ‘after’ are inessential. This exposition would not suffer were ‘independently of’ and ‘dependent upon’ introjected.
- 5.
Cf. the earlier illustrations.
- 6.
Yet the designation is specific in that it excludes myriad other kinds of representations of the world. The real steak’s possession of properties which can induce gustatory delight in me is no part of any scene of that steak. The nightingale’s song is replicable, but not because it is part of a scene. The scrape I endure may be due to the icy, rough surface of the granite I clamber upon, but the scrape is not a replication of any part of the granite, whereas my visual memory of the granite may indeed have properties of the granite block itself – such as those an artist could commit to canvas in a painting of that block.
- 7.
The articles to which Hanson refers are collected in Wisdom (1969). –MDL.
- 8.
Hanson’s free translation of part of Wittgenstein (1922, 4.016). –MDL.
- 9.
At least this is true of the assumption that classical celestial mechanics could be applied in principle to any astronomical phenomena, any where and any how in the universe.
- 10.
Cf. Hanson, ‘Leverrier: the zenith and nadir of Newtonian mechanics’, Chapter 6, this volume.
- 11.
‘Suction’ is just a quick way of designating ‘pressure differential’ – which moves the wing from the high pressure region below it, toward the low pressure region above. So this is, in effect, the same phenomenon Newton had in mind with his sine squared law. Only, the actual difference in pressure is many times greater than could be calculated by that law.
- 12.
Cf. Hanson (1965). See Part III of this volume as well.
- 13.
Of course, the increase will not always be linear in this way. The relationship will be very complex, from a functional point of view, in most cases. But there will be some functional connection between the geometrical deformation, and the corresponding fluid mechanical deformation.
- 14.
The English translation given here appears to be Hanson’s own. The full sentence Hanson paraphrases is as follows, “Und aus ihr wurde die Buchstabenschrift, ohne das Wesentliche der Abbildung zu verlieren.” –MDL.
References
Hanson, Norwood Russell. [1958] 2010. Patterns of discovery: An inquiry into the conceptual foundations of science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1965. Aristotle (and others) on motion through air. Review of Metaphysics 19: 133–147.
Wisdom, John. 1969. Logical constructions. New York: Random House.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1922. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Trans. C.K. Ogden, with German original (Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.
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Hanson, N.R. (2020). A Picture Theory of Theory-Meaning. In: Lund, M.D. (eds) What I Do Not Believe, and Other Essays. Synthese Library, vol 38. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1739-5_1
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