triointelligence.blogg.se

The conclusion of this argument is that Ramsey sentences are trivially satisfied, in the sense that if what they say about observables is true (and a cardinality requirement is satisfied) then they are guaranteed to be true.

However, the resulting position is subject to a crippling objection deriving originally from an argument originally proposed by Max Newman in a review of Bertrand Russell’s The analysis of matter (Newman, 1928). According to Maxwell, Ramsey sentences express precisely the structural claims of scientific theories, so to be a structural realist is to believe that the cognitive (that is, potentially knowledge-expressing) content of a scientific theory is expressed in its Ramsey sentence. An idea proposed originally by Maxwell, 1970a, Maxwell, 1970b is that we can elucidate the notion of structure using Ramsey sentences, formed by replacing the theoretical terms in the theory by existentially quantified second-order variables. The question then arises of how we identify the ‘structural’ features of the world of which we can allegedly have knowledge. 1 Structural realists argue that their position can provide a synthesis of both scientific realism and anti-realist empiricism, and retains the advantages of each view. Structural realism about scientific theories involves the claim that while we do not have knowledge of the natures of unobservable entities, we can nevertheless know their structural features. A line of argument which has gained some currency in recent literature runs as follows.