Explanation in the Semantic Conception of Theory Structure

Abstract

The semantic conception of theories has a relatively short history the beginnings of which Frederick Suppe has traced to von Neumann (Suppe 1988). Two other early initiators and advocates were Evert Beth in 1948-49 (Beth 1948, 1949; see also 1961) and Patrick Suppes in 1957 in his Introduction to Logic (Suppes, 1957). Beth advanced what has become known as a state space approach while Suppes advanced a set-theoretical predicate approach. Suppes suggested that scientific theories are more appropriately formalized as set-theoretical predicates. Shortly thereafter in 1961 Robert Stoll in his Set Theory and Logic (Stoll, 1961) made a similar claim about the formalization of informal theories of which scientific theories are instances. Suppes wrote a number of papers during the 1960's in which he indicated the features of theories that were better represented on a set-theoretical predicate conception of theories (see, for example Suppes, 1962).

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