Structuralism (philosophy of science)

In the philosophy of science, structuralism (also known as scientific structuralism or as the structuralistic theory-concept) asserts that all aspects of reality are best understood in terms of empirical scientific constructs of entities and their relations, rather than in terms of concrete entities in themselves. Structuralism is an active research program in the philosophy of science, which was first developed in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s by several analytic philosophers. As an instance of structuralism, the concept of matter should be interpreted not as an absolute property of nature in itself, but instead of how scientifically-grounded mathematical relations describe how the concept of matter interacts with other properties, whether that be in a broad sense such as the gravitational fields that mass produces or more empirically as how matter interacts with sense systems of the body to produce sensations such as weight. Structuralism's aim is to comprise all important aspects of an empirical theory in one formal framework. The proponents of this meta-theoretic theory are Frederick Suppe, Patrick Suppes, Ronald Giere, Joseph D. Sneed, Wolfgang Stegmüller, es, Wolfgang Balzer, John Worrall, Elie Georges Zahar, Pablo Lorenzano, Otávio Bueno, Anjan Chakravartty, Tian Yu Cao, Steven French, and Michael Redhead. The term "structural realism" for the variation of scientific realism motivated by structuralist arguments, was coined by American philosopher es in 1968. In 1998, the British structural realist philosopher James Ladyman distinguished epistemic and ontic forms of structural realism. The philosophical concept of (scientific) structuralism is related to that of epistemic structural realism (ESR). ESR, a position originally and independently held by Henri Poincaré (1902), Bertrand Russell (1927), and Rudolf Carnap (1928), was resurrected by John Worrall (1989), who proposes that there is retention of structure across theory change.