THE SEMANTIC VIEW specifications, Sloep and van der Steen proceed to criticize the semantic view of theories for making overly "tidy" (their term) and "weak" (they use "uninformative" as a synonym) the connections between theories and phenomena. But the semantic view of theories itself says nothing about how complicated or informative theory applications are in general. Whether a theory application is complicated or uncomplicated, and informative or uninformative, depends on the nature of the theory being instantiated.
To take an example, instantiations of selection theories (like frequencydependent theories, kin-selection theories, etc.) are more or less complicated and informative depending on how one defines "fitness" and "natural selection." On the propensity interpretations of "fitness" and "natural selection" (Brandon 1978, Mills and Beatty 1979), instantiations of selection theories are more complicated and informative than on interpretations of "fitness" and "natural selection" based exclusively on actual descendant contribution.
To claim, as Sloep and van der Steen do, that empirical applications of semantically construed theories are "obviously simple and straightforward" is plain wrong.
Sloep and van der Steen clearly do not treat their "caricature" of evolutionary biology according to the semantic view entirely as a caricature. I find that especially unfortunate because the semantic view is not a view of science as a whole, but a view of theories. No one concerned with pursuing the semantic view presumes that the whole point of science is just to instantiate system specifications. One also wants to explain things. Having recognized an instantiation of a system specification, one may wonder why that particular system instantiates that specification (which may involve pursuing still other system specifications), or one may want to use the instantiation in question to explain something else. It is easy to criticize the semantic view of theories for being an incomplete view of science; but it is also beside the point to do so.