In Praise of the Representation Theorem

Cartwright, N

Abstract

This paper will take up three of Patrick Suppes’s favourite topics: representation, invariance and causality. I begin not immediately with Suppes’s own work but with that of his Stanford colleague, Michael Friedman. Friedman argues that various high level claims of physics theories are not empirical laws at all but rather constitutive principles, principles without which the concepts of the theory would lack empirical content. I do not disagree about the need for constitutive principles. Rather I think Friedman has mislocated them, and entirely at the wrong end of the scale of abstraction. It is representation theorems, as Pat pictures them, that are the true constitutive principles, and that is true for theories far beyond physics.

Citation

Cartwright, N. (2008). In Praise of the Representation Theorem. In M. Frauchiger, & W. Essler (Eds.), Representation, evidence, and justification : themes from Suppes (83-90). Ontos Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110323566.83

• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2008
• Deposit Date: Sep 22, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 19, 2016
• Pages: 83-90
• Series Title: Lauener library of analytical philosophy
• Series Number: 1
• Book Title: Representation, evidence, and justification : themes from Suppes
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110323566.83
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1645214