The Received View

Today's topic is what Suppe calls "the Received View." It is a paradigm of the views of the logical positivists. I doubt anyone ever held the received view. What is true is that it is a view the logical positivists, in some sense, would have liked to hold—they didn't because they knew it had problems. Nonetheless, the views they held were to a large extent attempts to hold the received view as completely as possible. I suspect that some logical positivist at some time held each part of the received view, but no one ever endorsed the whole package.

Why is it worth looking at, then? It is a core of the logical positivist view and most views and problems in present-day philosophy of science are motivated by criticisms of it. The criticisms are generally presented as criticisms of the logical positivists, but, though they are criticisms of the received view, most of the criticisms are ones that at least some of the logical positivists were aware of and tried to confront at various times.

Why has modern philosophy of science evolved through criticism of the recieved view? Because logical positivism was dominant in Anglo-American philosophy, and especially in the philosophy of science for the middle of the 20th century. (But see Putnam's history for a more nuanced view.) The reason is that they mounted a strong criticism to earlier views that they superseded.

There are (at least) two myths about the origins of logical positivism, one told by Rosenberg and the other by Suppe.

The Rosenberg myth

Before the logical positivists all was idealism. Idealists (Hegel) made use of many ill-defined or even undefined "concepts" that they bandied about. You were just supposed to "catch on" to what they meant without ever being told. The boogeymen were the World Soul and, in science, actually, embryology, Entelechy, a nonspatial nontemporal "organizing principle" of embryological development and of life itself. Driesch, to whom entelechy is attributed, discovered that embryos are robust. (Heidegger on Nothing.)

The logical positivists were too clear-headed to fall for this wooly-mindedness, and they wanted to save philosophy from it, and so they developed a criterion of meaningfulness that would serve to extirpate such nonsense from philosophy and especially (a lot of the early logical positivists were trained physicists) from the philosophy of science.

The criterion is the Verifiability Criterion of Meaning: A sentence is meaningful only if there is a way to confirm or infirm it, a "test." There is no way to test for the presence of a world soul or of entelechy and so sentences using those words are nonsense, that is, meaningless. It is natural to extend the verifiability criterion to a theory of meaning: The meaning of a sentence is its conditions of verification (or falsification).

The simplest version of verification is a condition under which a sentence is true and known to be true. Science is often not so simple, and so the criterion was generally taken to be that there were observations or experiences that made it more or less likely that a sentence was true, not that it was certainly true.

Many of the most prominent logical positivists wielded their criterion gleefully and with abandon: Religion is meaningless. Ethical statements ("Murder is wrong") are meaningless. And so on. The characteristic logical positivist criticism of any philosophical opponent (the idealists) was not that the opponent was wrong, but that the opponent's view was meaningless.

--++++ The Suppe Myth Logical positivism is first and foremost a philosophy of science. The broader implications arose only as an extension of that central part of logical positivism. Logical positivism arose as an attempt to make philosophical sense of the new physics: special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics.

German universities had (and still have) a single Herr Doktor Professor at the head of each department, and he ran the department as a fiefdom. Therefore all the physicists in a given physics department endorsed the same philosophy of science. The dominant views were all incompatible with the new physics.

The following fairy tale of how special relativity works had wide circulation: If the speed of light is constant, we can use it to make clocks and devices for measuring distance, and we discover that the fundamental physical units of time and distance are different for different observers. That kind of story puts verification by observers at the center of what is "really going on" in the world. It suggests the verification theory of meaning as fundamental for science.

The third myth

Logical positivism was a philosophical underpinning to a social democratic political philosophy that arose in opposition to an authoritarian idealism. (Neurath was a prominent logical positivist and Marxist who was President of the Central Economic Administration for the short lived Soviet Republic of Bavaria, General Secretary of the Austrian Federation for Housing and Garden Cities, founder and director of the Museum for Housing and Urban Development, later the Museum of Economy and Society in Vienna, and very active in social reform in England (especially with respect to public housing).)

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The Received View

Science is about theories. Theories should, for clarity, ideally be formulated in mathematical logic.

The language has terms ("words") of three kinds:

1. logico-mathematical (all, and, not, identical, 3, %$\pi$%, ...)
2. observational
3. theoretical

The logico-mathematical terms are introduced by convention. They have no content, truths expressed using only such terms are "tautologies" that just follow from the definitions of the terms.

The theoretical terms are introduced to simplify and systematize the observed phenomena. They must be defined, using logic and mathematics, from observation terms using correspondence rules (c rules):

T if and only if O.

That is, each theoretical term is explicitly defined using only (logic, mathematics, and) observational terms.

Every sentence has verification conditions. Scientific truths are cashed out in terms of procedures performed by individual observers.

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What counts as observable? The two standard versions were

1. Sense data.
2. Whatever is appropriate to the theory at hand.

The most common considered, final view was that what counts as observable may be different for different problems or theories, and needs to be appropriate to the task at hand.

There was immediate recognition that asking for c rules was asking for too much. Various weakenings were considered.

Easy example: temperature. -- ShaughanLavine - 17 Jan 2006