Models and Theories: a Semantic Approach to Scientific Theories

Science is rapidly developing in the 21st century. The philosophy of science helps to clarify some of the concepts used in the scientific language. Understanding the status of the basic concepts of science as a theory and model will provide a fruitful basis for further discussions about the nature of scientific theories. The subject of the philosophy of science is the study of scientific concepts, the methodology of science and theoretical activities that discipline involves. In the philosophy of science, the concepts of model and theory occupy an important place. I will try to demonstrate aspects of some approaches using examples of both natural and exact sciences. This paper provides the evolution of these concepts, their ontological status and functions. The main problem of the work is analysis of the redefinition between theory and model that occurred in the philosophy of science of the 20th century. The task of considering these approaches is to and try to and try to reveal the advantages of the semantic approach for modern science. The significant moment in the history of science was the turn from the perception of term “theory” as a set of axioms, to the understanding of “theory” as a set of models. I am going to describe three stages of consideration of this problem: the syntactic, model-theoretic, and semantic approach to scientific theories. The basic concepts will be here: theory, model, syntactic view, model-theoretic approach, semantic view. The main result of this work can be a description of a comprehensive view of the relationship of models to theories at a given time, which is expressed in the framework of three different approaches. Also, special attention will be paid to the semantic, that is, the most modern approach in this discussion. Its methodological advantages and disadvantages, will be discussed. The systematization of views of philosophers of science within a single research will also be useful for developing further discussions on this topic.