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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Quentin Ruyant
Quentin Ruyant*
Affiliation:
To contact the author, please write to: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; e-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

Callender and Cohen have proposed to apply a “Gricean strategy” to the constitution problem of scientific representation. They suggest that scientific representation can be reduced to stipulation by epistemic agents. This account has been criticized for not making a distinction between symbolic and epistemic representation and not taking into account the communal aspects of representation. These criticisms would not apply if Grice’s actual strategy were properly employed. I transpose Grice’s strategy to epistemic representation. 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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 88 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 533 - 553
Copyright
Copyright 2021 by the Philosophy of Science Association. All rights reserved.

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