Teoricidad y contrastación: hacia un enfoque estructuralista

BERNABÉ, FEDERICO NAHUEL; ROFFÉ, ARIEL; GINNOBILI, SANTIAGO

Encuentro; XII Encuentro Iberoamericano sobre Metateoría Estructuralista; 2021

Centro de Estudios de Filosofía e Historia de la Ciencia (CEFHIC-UNQ-CONICET)

Theobservational-theoretical distinction has played a central role in thephilosophy of science from logical empiricism onwards. Developments within thediscipline have shown that such a distinction hides two non-identicaldistinctions: observational vs. non-observational and theoretical vs.non-theoretical. Likewise, metatheoretical structuralism proposed a moresophisticated treatment of theoricity in terms of the operational dependence orindependence of concepts from the theories in which they appear. Despite thisremarkable sophistication, it is still generally accepted that the distinctionbetween theoretical and non-theoretical concepts coincides with the explanatoryvs. non-explanatory and testing vs. non-testing distinctions. Ginnobili andCarman argued for the independence between theoricity and explanation. In thispaper we will advance a claim for the independence between both theoricity andexplanation, on the one hand, and testing, on the other. To do so, we propose anaccount of theory testing based on the framework of metatheoretical structuralism,and apply it to natural selection theory and cladistics.