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True Griceanism: Filling the Gaps in Callender and Cohen’s Account of Scientific Representation

Ruyant, Quentin (2020) True Griceanism: Filling the Gaps in Callender and Cohen’s Account of Scientific Representation. Philosophy of Science. ISSN 1539-767X

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Abstract

Callender and Cohen have proposed to apply a “Gricean strategy” to the constitution problem of scientific representation, taking inspiration from Grice’s reduction of linguistic meaning to mental states. They suggest that scientific representation can be reduced to stipulation by epistemic agents. This account has been criticised for not making a distinction between symbolic and epistemic representation and not taking into account the communal aspects of scientific representation. I argue that these criticisms would not apply if Grice’s actual strategy were properly employed. I present Grice’s account of linguistic meaning and transpose his actual strategy and method to epistemic representation. This results in a reduction of epistemic representation to mental states that does not fall prey to the same criticisms. The main novelty of the resulting account is a distinction between contextual representational use and general representational status, which I address using the notion of indexicality.


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Item Type: Published Article or Volume
Creators:
CreatorsEmailORCID
Ruyant, Quentinquentin.ruyant@gmail.com
Keywords: Scientific Representation Griceanism
Subjects: General Issues > Models and Idealization
General Issues > Structure of Theories
Depositing User: Mr. Quentin Ruyant
Date Deposited: 11 Mar 2020 03:02
Last Modified: 11 Mar 2020 03:02
Item ID: 16990
Journal or Publication Title: Philosophy of Science
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Subjects: General Issues > Models and Idealization
General Issues > Structure of Theories
Date: 2020
ISSN: 1539-767X
URI: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/16990

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