Embeddability, syntax, and semantics in accounts of scientific theories (Q750410)

B. van Fraassen and several other philosophers of science have recently advocated what has come to be known as the semantic account of scientific theories, presented as an improvement on the positivist account, now called the syntactic account. Van Fraassen claims that the syntactic account cannot capture the notion of one theory being ``embedded'' in another one, nor notions of ``empirical adequacy'' and ``empirical equivalence'', definable in terms of embeddability. The author defines a syntactic concept, ``implantability'', analogous to the semantic concept of ``embeddability''. He then considers van Fraassen's definitions of ``empirical adequacy'' and ``empirical equivalence'', and gives syntactic definitions for these concepts in terms of the notion of implantability. In conclusion, he suggests that the semantic account is an improvement over the syntactic one, not because the former is semantic and the latter syntactic, but because of differences in how the accounts handle the relation between theories and observations.