From Causation to Explanation and Back
Year: 2004
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: The dominant topics in general philosophy of science during the second half of the twentieth century were surely the nature of scientific theory, realism, and explanation. The discussion of the nature of theory today is still very much in the same terms as that of fifty years ago although the central paradigm has changed. The standard view, to which I will return below, used to be that a theory is a deductive system formulated in a formal language. Nowadays it is probably the “semantic view” that dominates: theory is a set of models and any language will do for describing exactly what the models are like.3
Author: Nancy Cartwright
Institution: London School of Economics and Political Science
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1516445737