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A Syntactic and Semantic Analysis of Idealizations in Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

William F. Barr
William F. Barr*
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Cortland
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Abstract

Various laws and theories in the natural and social sciences are presented with a view to discerning the syntactic and semantic characteristics of many idealizations in science. Three different kinds of idealizations are discussed: ideal conditions, ideal cases, and idealized theories. An ideal condition is a formula in which state variables occur, whose existential closure is false, and for which there is another formula that can be constructed out of the original formula such that the existential closure of the new formula is true. An ideal case is a statement which is logically equivalent to a universal conditional which has an ideal condition as its antecedent. And an idealized theory is a set of false universal conditional statements. Alternative syntactic and semantic analyses are viewed and criticized.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , June 1971 , pp. 258 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © 1971 by The Philosophy of Science Association

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