Philosophy of Physics Seminar (Thursday - Week 1, HT19)

This talk addresses the question what it is to interpret a formalism. It aims to provide a general framework for talking about interpretations (of various kinds) in a rigorous way. First, I clarify what I mean by a formalism. Second, I give an account of what it is to establish a link between a formalism and data. For this purpose, I draw on the theory of relational databases to explicate what data schemas and collections of data are. I introduce the notion of an interpretive link using tools from mathematical logic. Third, I address the question how a formalism can be interpreted in a way that goes beyond a connection to data. The basic idea is that one extends a data schema to an ontological conceptual schema and links the formalism to this extended schema. I illustrate this account of interpretation by means of simple examples and highlight how it can be fruitfully applied to address conceptual problems in philosophy of science.