LTT: Dan Burnston скачать в хорошем качестве

LTT: Dan Burnston

Gricean inferentialism about scientific representation: A framework and two applications. Abstract: Traditional views of scientific representation are “referentialist.” They argue that a representation’s meaning is determined by a substantive relation (canonically, similarity or isomorphism) to what it represents. These views face well known problems in accounting for idealization and the “problem of style” – i.e., the presence of many different forms of representation. Inferentialism, which argues that a representation represents X in virtue of allowing an informed user to draw inferences about X, has emerged as a compelling alternative. However, much of the appeal of inferentialism remains promissory – there is little discussion in the literature of how exactly particular representations enable particular inferences. In this talk, I will offer a particular inferentialist theory of scientific representation. On “Gricean inferentialism,” a representation’s meaning is determined by its reference, which is intentionally determined by a scientist, and its inferential set – the inferences that are entailed, disallowed, and enabled (with further information) by the representation. I then apply this account to two case studies. In the first, from systems biology, I argue that inferentialism is able to account for “referential overlap,” on which multiple distinct representations are applied to the same entities and relations for different explanatory purposes. In the second, from systems neuroscience, I argue that Gricean inferentialism offers important resources for “integrative” forms of explanatory pluralism.