Scientific realism, the new mechanical philosophers, and the friends of modelling

A spectre is haunting philosophy of science in general and philosophy of the social sciences in particular. In highly simplified terms, there is a consensus that the syntactic or statement of scientific theories (the Received View, RV), with problems identified and defined in terms of their representations in some formal language, is beyond pale. Its most serious formal rival, the semantic view (the structuralist view is its European variant) is claimed to be insensitive to how scientific inquiry is actually conducted (see the articles in e.g. Morgan and Morrison 1999). Here NMPs have been joined in by Friends of Models of (FoMs, in brief) who maintain that the focus should be moved to models and model building instead of theories in the sense of RVs. Hopes therefore run high that the the alliances of NMPs and FoMs will change our conception of the results and the processes of scientific inquiry.

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