Teoría de los actos de habla

A successor theory being able to capture more modal information does not necessarily imply its proposed ontology is more correct. After all ontology is a zero sum game,214 _{either electrons exist or they don't. What a successor}

explanation does have is more modal information, more w-questions that it can answer for which the previous explanation is a subset. This does not mean that the perspective from the previous explanation should necessarily be abandoned, often the overlap in w-questions will be partial, and the older perspective will inform other models of other phenomena for which the new perspective is not adequate. For example, the classical genetic explanation of Mendel's peas may be superseded by a molecular genetic one but very few would argue that the perspective of classical genetics is not highly useful for capturing modal information in the field of evolutionary biology as a whole. The classical explanation occupies a modal subset of the molecular explanation, but classical genetics is still hugely useful in other explanations where the need for unification demands a degree of abstraction molecular genetics cannot accommodate. Remember that capturing modal structure is as much about removing irrelevancies as anything else.

This notion of perspectives and the surrealistic underpinnings of it, allow us to see that the reductionist physical intuition can be accommodated whilst maintaining a hierarchy of explanatory levels. To say what there ultimately is physically is about getting ontology correct, what we do when we (quasi) explain is get the perspective correct, and they are not one and the same.

DOMAINS

In an explanatory context domains are intimately linked to the notion of a perspective. Perspectives include the conceptual framework used (abstractions to allow the definition of new natural kinds for instance), the empirical domain, the level of coarse graining and degree of precision required in measurement. To say Newton's theory is true in a domain means that the domain is not only the set of systems Newton's theory is typically associated with, but that the observations of those systems are prescribed to a degree of precision at which relativistic effects are not measurable. The nature of the domain of applicability is shaped by the perspective. This is partly why there is a dialectic between models and systems. The empirical domain is not just read off from the world, levels of precision have to be specified or are implicitly incorporated, and the perspective can influence the way in which empirical data is collated and partitioned. So when the claim is made that a quasi-explanation recreates the modal structure of the world from a particular perspective what is claimed is that that perspective allows the definitions of a set of variables which can be linked modally to answer w-questions in an empirical domain to a specified degree of precision. So from a certain perspective Newtonian mechanics is explanatory, now and forever.

The notion of the domain is a crucial concept. Remember that in Tarski's formalism we need to step outside the language a statement is made in to evaluate the truth of it. In other words, we need a metalanguage to evaluate truth conditions. This is the inspiration for da Costa & French's distinction between an extrinsic view of theories and an intrinsic view. Quasi-true theories are correspondence-true in their domain from the intrinsic view.

If the notion of quasi-truth just meant some parts of a theory were true and others weren't then we would not need the notion of the domain of applicability. If we have a list of true and false statements written down in the same book the true statements are simply true and the false ones false, and there is no need to specify a domain to assess the truth of the individuated parts of the book. This is not the situation with quasi-true theories, where we are not individuating in this way.215

Just as quasi-truth is defined with epistemic notions built into it, so too is quasi-explanation. A quasi-explanation is explanatory within its domain of applicability; its domain of applicability is defined by the modal information it accurately presents and by the parameter space the quasi-

explanation is built from. The parameter space is not a free choice, it is constrained by the empirical requirement of comparing theory with reality, by inbuilt ways of viewing the world humans have, and by the need to link different models/theories of the world. Some parameter choices are necessary to even define concepts to then ask modal questions about. Just as da Costa and French claim that Newtonian mechanics can be used as if it were true, so too is it possible to use some fictional-model explanations, as if the terms in them existed and were explanatory, because those models do recreate modal structure in the world.