The aim of this paper is to show that a comprehensive account of the role of representations in science should reconsider some neglected theses of the classical philosophy of science proposed in the first decades of the 20th century. More precisely, it is argued that the accounts of Helmholtz and Hertz may be taken as prototypes of representational accounts in which structure preservation plays an essential role. Following Reichenbach, structure-preserving representations provide a useful device for formulating an up-to-date version of (...) a (relativized) Kantian a priori. An essential feature of modern scientific representations is their mathematical character. That is, representations can be conceived as (partially) structure-preserving maps or functions. This observation suggests an interesting but neglected perspective on the history and philosophy of this concept, namely, that structure-preserving representations are closely related to a priori elements of scientific knowledge. Reichenbach’s early theory of a relativized constitutive but non-apodictic a priori component of scientific knowledge provides a further elaboration of Kantian aspects of scientific representation. To cope with the dynamic aspects of the evolution of scientific knowledge, Cassirer proposed a re-interpretation of the concept of representation that conceived of a particular representation as only one phase in a continuous process determined by pragmatic considerations. Pragmatic aspects of representations are further elaborated in the classical account of C.I. Lewis and the more modern of Hasok Chang. (shrink)

In comparing his conception of empiricism with that of other like-minded philosophers at the end of his 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism,' W. V. Quine famously emphasized the broader scope of his pragmatist commitment in these terms:Carnap, Lewis, and others take a pragmatic stand on the question of choosing between language forms, scientific frameworks; but their pragmatism leaves off at the imagined boundary between the analytic and the synthetic. In repudiating such a boundary I espouse a more thorough pragmatism.Such remarks have (...) resulted in Quine's work being associated with the American pragmatist tradition, where he is viewed as either continuing or reviving some of the main themes and issues representative of.. (shrink)

This paper sets out a semantics for C.I. Lewis's logic S2 based on the ontology of his 1923 paper ‘Facts, Systems, and the Unity of the World’. In that article, worlds are taken to be maximal consistent systems. A system, moreover, is a collection of facts that is closed under logical entailment and conjunction. In this paper, instead of defining systems in terms of logical entailment, I use certain ideas in Lewis's epistemology and philosophy of logic to define a class (...) of models in which systems are taken to be primitive elements but bear certain relations to one another. I prove soundness and completeness for S2 over this class of models and argue that this semantics makes sense of at least a substantial fragment of Lewis's logical theory. (shrink)