Steven French

This volume is presented in honour of Heinz Post, who founded a distinc tive and distinguished school of philosophy of science at Chelsea College, University of London. The 'Chelsea tradition' in philosophy of science takes the content of science seriously, as exemplified by the papers presented here. The unifying theme of this work is that of 'Correspondence, Invariance and Heuristics', after the title of a classic and seminal paper by Heinz Post, published in 1971, which is reproduced in this volume with the kind permission of the editors and publishers of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Described by Paul Feyerabend in Against Method as "brilliant" and " . . . a partial antidote against the view which I try to defend" (1975, p. 61, fn. 17), this paper, peppered with illustrative examples from the history of science, brings to the fore some of Heinz Post's central concerns: the heuristic criteria used by scientists in constructing their theories, the intertheoretic relationships which these criteria reflect and, in particular, the nature of the correspondence that holds between a theory and its predecessors (and its suc cessors). The appearance of this volume more than twenty years later is an indica tion of the fruitfulness of Post's contribution: philosophers of science continue to explore the issues raised in his 1971 paper.

The London and Bauer monograph occupies a central place in the debate concerning the quantum measurement problem. Gavroglu has previously noted the influence of Husserlian phenomenology on London's scientific work. However, he has not explored the full extent of this influence in the monograph itself. I begin this paper by outlining the important role played by the monograph in the debate. In effect, it acted as a kind of 'lens' through which the standard, or Copenhagen, 'solution' to the measurement problem came to be perceived and, as such, it was robustly criticized, most notably by Putnam and Shimony. I then spell out the Husserlian understanding of consciousness in order to illuminate the traces of this understanding within the London and Bauer text. This, in turn, yields a new perspective on this 'solution' to the measurement problem, one that I believe has not been articulated before and, furthermore, which is immune to the criticisms of Putnam and Shimony.

Sortal predicates have been associated with a counting process, which acts as a criterion of identity for the individuals they correctly apply to. We discuss in what sense certain types of predicates suggested by quantum physics deserve the title of ‘sortal’ as well, although they do not characterize either a process of counting or a criterion of identity for the entities that fall under them. We call such predicates ‘quantum-sortal predicates’ and, instead of a process of counting, to them is associated a ‘criterion of cardinality’. After their general characterization, it is discussed how these predicates can be formally described.

Stein once urged us not to confuse the means of representation with that which is being represented. Yet that is precisely what philosophers of science appear to have done at the meta-level when it comes to representing the practice of science. Proponents of the so-called ‘syntactic’ view identify theories as logically closed sets of sentences or propositions and models as idealised interpretations, or ‘theoruncula, as Braithwaite called them. Adherents of the ‘semantic’ approach, on the other hand, are typically characterised as taking them to be families of models that are set-theoretic, according to Suppes and others, or abstract, as Giere has argued. da Costa and French (Science and Partial Truth. OUP, Oxford, 2003) suggested that we should refrain from ontological speculation as to the nature of scientific theories and models and focus on their appropriate representation for various purposes within the philosophy of science. Such an approach allows both linguistic and non-linguistic resources to play their appropriate role (see also French and Saatsi, Philosophy of Science, Proceedings of the 2004 PSA Meeting, 78:548–559, 2006) and can be supported by recent case studies illustrating the heterogeneity of scientific practice. My aim in this paper is to further develop this ‘quietist’ view, and to indicate how it offers a fruitful way forward for the philosophy of science.

Thirty years after the conference that gave rise to The Structure of Scientific Theories, there is renewed interest in the nature of theories and models. However, certain crucial issues from thirty years ago are reprised in current discussions; specifically: whether the diversity of models in the science can be captured by some unitary account; and whether the temporal dimension of scientific practice can be represented by such an account. After reviewing recent developments we suggest that these issues can be accommodated within the partial structures formulation of the semantic or model-theoretic approach

In this essay I shall focus on the adoption of the Semantic Approach by structural realists, including myself, who have done so on the grounds that it wears its structuralist sympathies on its sleeve. Despite this, the SA has been identified as standing in tension with the ontological commitments of the so-called ’ontic’ form of this view and so I shall explore that tension before discussing the usefulness of the SA in framing scientific representation and concluding with a discussion of the implications of the ontological status of theories and models themselves.