Philosophy of Science in the 21st Century

Abstract

The approach to the philosophy of science currently known as “Metatheoretical (or Metascientific) Structuralism” (henceforth “MS”, for short), originated in the pioneering work of the late Joseph D. Sneed, The Logical Structure of Mathematical Physics, a bit more than 50 years ago. After an initial phase of gradual consolidation and refinements, to which, besides Sneed himself, his closest collaborators Wolfgang Balzer, C. Ulises Moulines and Wolfgang Stegmüller essentially contributed in the 1970’s and 1980’s, followed soon by other authors mainly in Germany, this metascientific program reached its full maturity in 1987 with the treatise An Architectonic for Science – The Structuralist Program, co-authored by Balzer, Moulines, and Sneed. Since then, a great number of philosophers of science from many different countries around the world, from Australia and China through Canada and the USA to Western Europe, have discussed, refined, and/or further applied MS, both to the foundations of empirical science in general and to the detailed study of particular theories, ranging from classic.