Metaphysicians speak of laws of nature in terms of necessity and universality; scientists, in terms of symmetry and invariance. In this book van Fraassen argues that no metaphysical account of laws can succeed. He analyzes and rejects the arguments that there are laws of nature, or that we must believe there are, and argues that we should disregard the idea of law as an adequate clue to science. After exploring what this means for general epistemology, the author develops the empiricist (...) view of science as a construction of models to represent the phenomena. (shrink)

Bas C. van Fraassen presents an original exploration of how we represent the world.

According to the semantic view of scientific theories, theories are classes of models. I show that this view -- if taken seriously as a formal explication -- leads to absurdities. In particular, this view equates theories that are truly distinct, and it distinguishes theories that are truly equivalent. Furthermore, the semantic view lacks the resources to explicate interesting theoretical relations, such as embeddability of one theory into another. The untenability of the semantic view -- as currently formulated -- threatens to (...) undermine scientific structuralism. (shrink)

Halvorson argues through a series of examples and a general result due to Myers that the “semantic view” of theories has no available account of formal theoretical equivalence. De Bouvere provides criteria overlooked in Halvorson’s paper that are immune to his counterexamples and to the theorem he cites. Those criteria accord with a modest version of the semantic view that rejects some of Van Fraassen’s apparent claims while retaining the core of Patrick Suppes’s proposal. I do not endorse any version (...) of the semantic view of theories. (shrink)