Abstract

Abstract The mid-twentieth-century account of theory reduction, like the deductive-nomological model of explanation, served the useful function of providing a simple model of an important kind of scientific reasoning expressed in a certain symbolic language, the theories of predicate logic. However, I have been arguing that philosophers of science were carried away by their enthusiasm for predicate logic as an instrument of philosophical analysis, as were philosophers of mathematics a generation earlier, an enthusiasm that limited their ability to address several important features of scientific and mathematical rationality, and indeed of predicate logic itself as a vehicle of that rationality.

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