ABSTRACT
There are three different accounts of how scientific theories are structured and used: the syntactic account, the semantic account and, more recently, the pragmatic account. The pragmatic account is still evolving. This chapter focuses on a significant feature of bench medicine: the creation and use of models and theories. It gives an overview of the structure of models and theories and the roles they play in science generally and bench medicine specifically. We describe each account beginning with a brief overview of the pragmatic account. The chapter also provides some examples from bench medicine. Essentially, bench medicine seeks to develop an integrated understanding of systems (interacting entities in a causal network), as the example above illustrates; clinical medicine, by contrast, is largely focused on discovering associations of individual events isolated from a system (that is, its focus is on a specific intervention and its outcome).
