An architectonic for science. The structuralist program (Q1105580)

This is a systematic account of the methods and results of the structuralist program as applied to empirical science. A representation scheme for scientific knowledge is developed and tested for adequacy by applying it to reconstruct certain fragments of empirical science. The fundamental intuition is that the smallest significant parts of empirical science, ``theory-elements'', like empirical laws, are best characterized not as linguistic but as model-theoretic entities. The authors distinguish between the vocabulary of a theory, including analytic truths about the concepts involved, and the laws formulated in this vocabulary. This permits a distinction between the potential models of a theory- element, which contain the requisite vocabulary and satisfy the analytic truths, and models, which in addition satisfy empirical laws. Theory- elements have a purely formal part, a theory-core, and a class of intended applications. Potential models and models belong to the core, which in addition contains constraints, characterizing relations among different applications of the same theory, intertheoretical links, and partial potential models, fragments of potential models that can be understood or interpreted independently of the theory-element in question. The notion of the empirical claim of a theory-element is defined. Theory-elements are linked together in theory-nets: sets of theory-elements ordered in a specific way by a specialization relation. Such a theory-net corresponds to one common conception of an empirical theory. The formal apparatus is later extended by the concept of `theory- evolution' to provide a way of describing one important way in which empirical theories develop over time, corresponding roughly to what Kuhn has called `normal science'. The formal account is supplement with pragmatic concepts, and in the diachronic account with socio-economic concepts as well. In Chapter VI, the concept of intertheoretical links is broadened to include `global intertheoretical relations', such as reduction and empirical equivalence. Some issues about reduction involving explicit reference to language are discussed: notions of derivation, translation and incommensurability of theories. The authors then seek to elaborate their ideas so as to account for the inexactness and approximate nature of most real empirical knowledge. In the final chapter, they consider the possibility of applying their methods to increasingly larger fragments of empirical science, or even the whole of empirical science. The concept of a theory-holon is introduced and a precise definition of ``theoreticity'' of a component of a theory-element in a theory-holon is provided. Finally, two views about the global structure of a theory-holon are considered and discussed: foundationalism and coherentism.