The Meaning of Theoretical Terms: A Critique of the Standard Empiricist Construal

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses a general characterization of scientific theories that has been developed, with certain individual differences, by various thinkers sharing a broadly empiricist outlook and a precise logicoanalytical approach to problems in the philosophy of science. This characterization is often referred to as the standard construal, or the standard analysis, of scientific theories. A scientific theory usually accounts for a class of empirical phenomena by positing particular kinds of entities and processes, which are taken to be governed by specified laws of their own, and which are, intuitively speaking, farther removed from the realm of our everyday experience than are the phenomena the theory is to explain. In characterizing those entities and processes, a theory typically employs a set of new terms, which are said to form its theoretical vocabulary. They are new in the sense that they are not among those already in use in the given discipline; in particular, they do not occur in the vocabulary used to describe the phenomena to be explained.