An inferential account on theoretical concepts in physics

• Autores: Javier Anta
• Localización: Crítica: revista hispanoamericana de filosofía, ISSN 0011-1503, Vol. 52, Nº. 156, 2020, págs. 59-85
• Idioma: inglés
• DOI: 10.22201/iifs.18704905e.2020.1223
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo
• Resumen
  • español

    En este artículo desarrollaré una propuesta inferencial acerca del sentidoy referencia de conceptos en física, basada principalmente en la noción pragmática de“validez inferencial”. Primero, distinguiremos entre sentido empírico y significadoteórico como dos modalidades diferentes del sentido, donde el primero depende dela codificación consistente de valores experimentales, en la línea de Chang (2004),y el segundo en la coherencia semántica con otros conceptos. Además, argumen-taremos que estas distintas contribuciones a la validez de las inferencias conllevanmecanismos de fijación referencial causales y representacionales-descriptivos, respec-tivamente. Finalmente, nos basaremos en los conceptos de entropía como caso deestudio de nuestra propuesta.

  • English

    In this paper we develop an inferential account on the meaning andreference of theoretical concepts in physics, mainly based on the pragmatic notionof ‘inferential validity’. Firstly, we distinguish between empirical meaningfulnessand theoretical significance as two different modes of meaning, wherein the formerdepends on consistently encoding experimental values, as proposed by Chang (2004),and the latter on being semantically coherent with other concepts. Secondly, weargue that each of these contributions to the validity of inferences imports a causaland representational mechanism of reference-fixing, respectively. Finally, we will relyon entropy concepts as our case study.

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