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Observationality and the Comparability of Theories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Philip A. Ostien
Philip A. Ostien*
Affiliation:
The University of Iowa
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Extract

Feyerabend and others have been defending for some time the thesis that even observation sentences depend for their meanings on the thegries in which they play a role. According to the most radical version of this thesis, if two theories contain incompatible theoretical statements, then even if the observation terms and sentences associated with the two theories are the same, these terms and sentences mean something different, according as they are associated with one theory or the other. This claim has made it hard to see how, on this view, any two theories could be said to compete, or be incompatible, or be comparable on the basis of observation.

The whole dispute over this claim seems highly suspect to begin with. For look at the philosophical terms in which it is couched. On the one hand there is the notion of the “meaning” of a term or sentence, whose status as a useful tool of philosophical analysis has been in serious question for the past two or three decades.

Type
Contributed Papers: Session II
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1974 , 1974 , pp. 271 - 289
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland

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Footnotes

*

My indebtedness to the work of W. V. Quine will be observable throughout this paper, at least to those familiar with his work. I shall not signal every borrowed phrase or idea with an explicit reference, but let this note stand as a general acknowledgement of my indebtedness. Any mistakes, either of exposition or of application, are of course my own.

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