Models and theories are of central importance in science, and scientists spend substantial amounts of time building, testing, comparing and revising models and theories. It is therefore not surprising that the nature of scientific models and theories has been a widely debated topic within the philosophy of science for many years.
The product of two decades of research, this book provides an accessible yet critical introduction to the debates about models and theories within analytical philosophy of science since the 1920s. Roman Frigg surveys and discusses key topics and questions, including:
- What are theories? What are models? And how do models and theories relate to each other?
- The linguistic view of theories (also known as the syntactic view of theories), covering different articulations of the view, its use of models, the theory-observation divide and the theory-ladenness of observation, and the meaning of theoretical terms.
- The model-theoretica
