of basic-science research is explanations made by developing theories that satisfy empirical tests, theories that are thereby made scientific laws that function in scientific explanations.
Wherever possible the explanation should enable prediction of either future events or evidence of past events. And it is beneficial furthermore for the explanation to enable control of explained nonlinguistic reality by applied science such as new engineering technologies, new medical therapies and new social policies, where success makes pragmatism blatantly self-evident.
Discovery:
Discovery is the construction of new and empirically more adequate theories.
Contemporary pragmatism is consistent with computerized discovery systems, which aim to proceduralize and mechanize new theory construction, in order to advance contemporary science.
In the “Introduction” to his magisterial Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science (1958), Yale University philosopher of science Norwood Russell Hanson wrote that earlier philosophers of science like the positivists had mistakenly regarded as paradigms of inquiry finished systems like Newton’s planetary mechanics instead of the unsettled, dynamic research sciences like contemporary microphysics. Hanson explains that the finished systems are no longer research sciences, although they were at one time. And he states that distinctions applying to the finished systems ought to be suspect when transferred to research disciplines, and that such transferred distinctions afford an artificial account of the activities in which Kepler, Galileo and Newton were actually engaged. He thus maintains that ideas such as “theory”, “hypothesis”, “law”, “causality” and “principle” if drawn from what he calls the finished “catalogue-sciences” found in undergraduate textbooks will ill prepare one for understanding research-science.
Both romantics and positivists define “theory” semantically, while contemporary pragmatists define “theory” pragmatically, i.e., by its function in basic research.
Contemporary pragmatists define both theory and observation language pragmatically instead of semantically. The pragmatics of both types of language is empirical testing.
Theories are universally quantified statements that are proposed for testing.
Test-designs are universally quantified statements that are presumed for testing, to identify the subject of the test and to describe procedures for execution of the test, and they include universal statements that are semantical rules for the test-outcome statements that are asserted when the test outcome is produced and known.
The semantics of newly constructed theories reveal new perspectives and ontologies.
Scientific laws are former theories that have been tested with nonfalsifying test outcomes.
Observation language is particularly quantified test-design and test-outcome statements with their semantics defined in the universally quantified test-design language.
Unlike positivists, pragmatists do not recognize any natural observation semantics. For believers in a theory, the theory language may also contribute to the observational semantics, but that semantical contribution cannot operate in reporting the test outcome without violating the test’s contingency.
Contemporary pragmatists individuate theories semantically.
Two theory expressions are different theories either if the expressions have different test designs so they identify different subjects, or if the expressions make contrary claims about the same subject as defined by the same test design.
Criticism:
Contemporary pragmatists recognize the empirical criterion as the only valid decision criterion that yields scientific progress.
On the pragmatist thesis of ontological relativity, semantics and ontologies can never trump the empirical criterion for criticism. Acceptance of ontologies is based upon empirical adequacy of a theory as demonstrated by empirical test outcomes. Thus contrary to romantics, pragmatists permit description of subjective mental states in social-science theories and explanations, but never require such description as a criterion for criticism. Or as Popper said, science is “subjectless”.
Pragmatists recognize the nontruth-functional hypothetical-conditional form of statement-schema for expressing proposed theories.
Pragmatists recognize the modus tollens falsifying argument for empirical testing of the theories.
Unlike the logical positivists, pragmatists do not recognize the Russellian truth-functional conditional logic for scientific criticism, because the logic of empirical testing is not truth-functional.
Explanation:
Explanation describes the occurrence of individual events and conditions as caused by the occurrence of other described events and conditions according to law statements.
Pragmatists recognize modus ponens nontruth-functional deductive logical argument with the hypothetical conditional statement form that includes universally quantified statements expressible in conditional form that are scientific laws. Whenever possible the explanation is predictive.
Laws are said to be “explained” in the sense that a set of logically related laws may form a deductive system partitioned into dichotomous subsets of explaining antecedent axioms and explained consequent theorems.
Chapter 3. Philosophy of Language
Many and probably most of the central concepts and issues in philosophy of science involve philosophy of language. Therefore the following selected elements of contemporary pragmatist philosophy of language are discussed in relation to philosophy of science.
3.01 Synchronic and Diachronic Analysis
To borrow some terminology from Ferdinand de Saussure’s classic Course in General Linguistics language analyses may be either synchronic or diachronic:
The synchronic view is static, because it exhibits the state of a language at a point in time like a photograph. And to borrow some terminology from Rudolf Carnap’s Meaning and Necessity with a revised meaning, in computational philosophy of science the state of the language for a specific scientific problem is displayed synchronically in a “semantical state description”. In the pragmatist’s semantical state description statements both of theory language and of the law language in the relevant test design function as semantical rules that describe the meanings of their constituent descriptive terms.
The diachronic view on the other hand exhibits two chronologically successive states of the language for the same problem as defined by a test design, and shows semantical change over the interim period. Then the view is a comparative-static semantical analysis like “before” and “after” photographs. And if a transitional process between the two successive language states is also described, as in the computer code for a discovery system, then the diachronic view is dynamic like a motion picture.
3.02 Object Language and Metalanguage
Many philosophers of science such as Rudolf Carnap in his Logical Syntax of Language distinguish two levels of language, object language and metalanguage.
Object
