JESÚS P. ZAMORA BONILLA MEANING AND TESTABILITY IN THE STRUCTURALIST THEORY OF SCIENCE

ABSTRACT. The connection between scientific knowledge and our empirical access to reality is not well explained within the structuralist approach to scientific theories. I argue that this is due to the use of a semantics not rich enough from the philosophical point of view. My proposal is to employ Sellars–Brandom’s inferential semantics to under-stand how can scientific terms have empirical content, and Hintikka’s game-theoretical semantics to analyse how can theories be empirically tested. The main conclusions are that scientific concepts gain their meaning through ‘basic theories ’ grounded on ‘common sense’, and that scientific method usually allows the pragmatic verification and falsification of scientific theories. 1