Empirical Content and Theoretical Justification in Metatheoretical Structuralism

Abstract

In the structuralist conception of scientific theory, it is common for their theses to be interpreted as neutral with respect to epistemological engagement, since their analysis is structural (Diederich, 1996). However, we intend to show that there is no such epistemological neutrality in one of the key pieces of metatheoretical structuralism, the notion of "intentional applications", and that from this derives an epistemic commitment related to the justification of scientific theories, according to which science is a "network" of logical relations between theories. To achieve that, we propose to analyze the semantic and epistemological implications of that notion and the role it plays in theoretical testability. One of the most radical consequences of the proposed analysis is that the previous notion (intentional applications) implies that some theories are justified by others; in other words, the justification of scientific theories would fall into an inter-theoretical coherentism, which we will specify later. Naturally, it is important to note that the defenders of metatheoretical structuralism (Balzer, Moulines & Sneed, 1987) and (Díez & Moulines, 1997) accept this implication and coherentist thesis. However, the problematic point, and what is new in this article, is that coherentismo compromises the justification of theories as it implies a regressus ad infinitum in the formal reconstruction. This defect of structuralism leads to two additional critics, one from the pragmatic point of view and the other form the semantic point of view. The first is that, if we accept the regressus thesis, the reconstruction may be unsuccessful for pragmatic effects, in other words, the formal correction of a theory obliges us to correct the set of presupposed theories that intervene in it. In the same way, the semantic dependence of a theory on its predecessors implies that if one of its fundamental concepts is modified, then a general review of all related theories in which the concept in question is relevant. The work, then, is an advance in this direction.