CARNAP AND SCIENTIFIC REALISM

THE RECEIVED IN FAVOR OF NEUTRALITY

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate Rudolf Carnap’s Received View focusing on his conception corcerning the debate on scientific realism. Such a conception represents an alternative for those who do not want to commit themselves to either a realist thesis or an antirealist thesis regarding science. In this sense, we emphasize that Carnap looks for a position of neutrality and coalition between realists and instrumentalists. Neutrality in the sense of not taking sides in the metaphysical debate, dissolving it, and coalition by seeking to build its approach by taking fundamental points of both realists and instrumentalists. This construction, by the way, is made based on not just in the classical Received View’s formulation in terms of theoretical postulates and correspondence rules, but on Carnap’s reformulation in terms of Ramsey and Carnap’s sentences. Through such sentences, Carnap is able to separate and therefore explicate the factual contente and the analytical content of scientific theories, solving one of the major problems involving the theoretical terms namely the definition of analyticity for theoretical language. Notwithstanding, his undertaking represents one of the final formulation of Logical Empiricism’s Received View, which, given the context of rejection and overcoming of the logical-empiricist movement, was not properly appreciated by the Philosophy of Science.