Realism about Structure : The Semantic View and Non - linguistic Representations ∗

The central concern of this paper is whether the Semantic Approach has the resources to appropriately capture the core tenets of structural realism. Chakravartty has argued that a realist notion of correspondence cannot be accommodated without introducing a linguistic component which undermines the Approach itself. We suggest that this worry can be addressed by an appropriate understanding of the role of language in this context. The real challenge, however, is how to incorporate the core notion of ‘explanatory approximate truth’ in such a way that the emphasis on structure is retained.