CONTENTS

1    THE PROBLEM

2    A CONJECTURAL SOLUTION

3    TESTING THE CONJECTURE

4     CONCLUSIONS - A THEORY OF THEORY

4   CONCLUSIONS - A THEORY OF THEORY

This essay began by posing the problem of theory. Different ways of expressing this question are the following.

• Why are there problems of understanding? 
  
  
• Once we have the empirical evidence, what more is added by sitting down and thinking about things?
  
  
• Why is theory such an important part of science?

A conjectural answer was developed starting from Frege’s assertion of the primacy of analysis. Experiment gives us initially unanalysed facts. We then have to articulate them, distill out of them the conceptual vocabulary (primarily a vocabulary of incomplete expressions) before we can say anything, true or false about them. This work is not pure creation on our part, but discovery of what was already there through the act of creation. This realist interpretation is supported by the proven ability of experimental facts, not just to falsify specific theories within a conceptual structure but also to cause the failure of the structure as a whole

The visible part of the business of theoretical science is the formulation of conjectures, the tracing of their consequences and the devising of experimental tests of the conjectures. But underneath this is the conceptual process of devising and evolving a language in which the theory and its individual conjectures can be tested. At a deeper level, experiment is involved in testing whether the concepts so devised actually do have reference - to turn conceptual invention into discovery.

If this account of theory is correct, then it follows that advantage may be gained by making more explicit the processes of articulation, as something separate from by going on in parallel with the formulation and testing of conjectures. Alongside theoretical physics, which is most of the time an application of mathematics, there should be a conceptual physics, which is an application of the philosophical method to the problems of physics. This idea is developed further in “The Philosophical Method” and “Conceptual Physics”.

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