The Received View

There was a philosophy of science roughly from the 1920s to the 1970s that was so dominant that all work in the philosophy of science that has come after has been, to varying degrees, a reaction to it. It is therefore important to understand it, not only for its own sake, but because without an understanding of it to provide historical context, much of what we will be reading won't make sense.

The philosophers who developed the received view did so mostly in Germany in a period in which three views of the philosophy of science were dominant:

1. Materialistic mechanism: We discover the mechanisms of the world, which is a material world, by empirical investigation (most importantly, experiment).
2. neo-Kantianism: Science uncovers the rational fundamental structure of the world, which, like mathematics is often thought to be, is necessary and independent of the details of the world, but we discover the structure in part by empirical investigation.
3. Machian positivism: Science proceeds entirely by generalizing from sensation.

Into this brew came relativity and quantum mechanics. These were, and are, very strange theories that, in very different ways, emphasize the role of the observer in science. That ruled out materialistic mechanism, which pictures the world as independent of observers. It also seemed to rule out neo-Kantianism, since all the supposed laws that had been endorsed turned out to be wrong. Machian positivism was the only view left standing, but it was no good because it couldn't make use of mathematics, and the new theories were profoundly mathematical.

A group of ex-physicists met to work out a new philosophy of science to be compatible with the new science and the following new mathematics:

Frege, Russell, Peirce, and a whole lot of others, in the late 1800s, invented a new logic and claimed that it sufficed to introduce all of mathematics using logical definitions.

The logical positivists "fixed up" Machian positivism by adding, in addition to empirical evidence, definitions or, as they often said, conventions. Mathematics was, they claimed, just a bunch of logical definitions and their consequences. AND NOTHING ELSE.

It is a consequence of the view that every meaningful statement is a combination of logical definitions and observable claims. They sloganized that by saying

The meaning of a term is its method of verification.

Though it was not the original motivation for the logical positivists, they came to use that criterion as a bludgeon against every other philosophy. They said, for example, that metaphysical questions are meaningless.

There is an obvious (easily fixed) problem with the view: science makes use of "theoretical terms" like "electron," "species," "global warming."

Here is the patch: There are three kinds of words: (logical), observational, and theoretical. Every theoretical term has a logical definition in terms of observational terms: %\[T\equiv O.\]% Such rules are called bridge laws.

The combination just presented is the core of the received view, but it requires lots of working out:

1. Actual formalization of real theories.
2. A logic of evidence (an "inductive logic").

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There were immediate internal problems with the received view. I'll list a few.

• What counts as observation, reports about the physical world or reports about appearances (sense data)?
• There are no bridge laws for dispositional terms.

Dispositional terms

Dispositional term is a forbidding sounding name for a familiar phenomenon: The standard example of a dispositional term is "water soluable." Something is water soluable if it is disposed to dissolve when placed in water.

Multiple realizability

The "same" property has lots of different ways of being observed. For example, temperature with many different kinds of thermometers.

The modified received view required not strict equivalence using bridge laws, but only that there be rules connecting theoretical terms with observational ones in such a way that each law of a theory can be tested observationally. -- ShaughanLavine - 20 Jan 2009