Dictionary of Arguments

Philosophical and Scientific Issues in Dispute

[german]

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The author or concept searched is found in the following controversies.

Disputed term/author/ism	Author Vs Author	Entry	Reference
Ramsey, F. P.	Fraassen Vs Ramsey, F. P.	I 54 FraassenVsSyntactical Approach: all this was a mistake: the empirical meaning (set of observation consequences) of a theory cannot be isolated in this syntactic way. If that were possible, T/E would say the same as T about what is observable and how the observed behaves, and nothing else. Unobservable/Fraassen: Will naturally differ from the observable in that it systematically lacks the characteristics of the observed. Unobservability/Fraassen: unless we ban the negation, we can express in a language of observation that something is unobservable. And to a certain degree even how these unobserved entities are. E.g. unobservable/Copenhagen Interpretation/Observation Language: says that there are things that sometimes have a particular position, and sometimes don’t. Important argument/Fraassen: I have just expressed this conclusion, without using a single TT. I 55 PhilosophyVsSyntaktical Approach: philosophers thought it to be rather too wide: many theories T are such that T/E is tautological. Such theories probably derive their empirical meaning from the observation consequences along with other theories or empirical hypotheses. I 56 Syntactical/FraassenVsSyntactical Approach: the syntactically defined relations are simply the wrong ones! The biggest mistake of the syntactical approach was to focus on irrelevant technical questions: FraassenVsRamsey/FraassenVsCarnap/FraassenVsCraig: things like the Ramsey sentence, Carnap Conditional, Craig’s Theorem, "reduction sentence", "empirical language", theoretical terms (TT) "axiomatization in limited vocabulary" were all self-inflicted problems! They are philosophically not important!. FraassenVsRamsey Sentence.	Fr I B. van Fraassen The Scientific Image Oxford 1980

The author or concept searched is found in the following disputes of scientific camps.

Disputed term/author/ism	Pro/Versus	Entry	Reference
Ramsey-Sentence	Versus	I 56 FraassenVsRamsey Sentence / FraassenVsCarnap / FraassenVsCraig - Vs separation observation language / theory of language - irrelevant technical questions - Vs syntactic representation of theories - FraassenVsLanguage Dependence.	Link to abbreviations/authors