Partiality, Pursuit and Practice

Abstract

My intention in this paper is to draw connections between three areas of recent interest in the philosophy of science, broadly characterised: the introduction of partial structures into the model-theoretic or ‘semantic’ approach, the underlying structure of pursuit and heuristics and the recent emphasis on scientific ‘practice’. The connections are, perhaps, obvious, but worth highlighting nonetheless and they have not to my knowledge yet been fully explored.

I would like to thank James Ladyman for numerous discussions of these topics and for prompting many of the ideas presented here. Whatever is right or interesting about them is largely down to him. I would also like to thank Otávio Bueno, whose email conversations helped me get clear on a number of points. Finally, a version of this paper was presented at a meeting of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science and I would like to thank Jim Cushing, Colin Howson, David Papineau, Stathis Psillos, Mauricio Suárez and John Worrall for their interesting and useful comments. Of course, the responsibility for all errors and infelicities, philosophical or otherwise, is entirely mine.