"Theories and Their Interpretations"

I just heard this paper by Larry Sklar.  Among the topics he raised was the issue of what he called "quasi-positivist" intepretations of certain kinds of puzzling scientific results.  This is the tendency of physicists, confronted with a situation where multiple seemingly quite different interpretations of a theory produce identical theoretical results, to retreat to a claim that the theory is really about those results, and so that the seemingly different interpretations amount to the same thing.

Sklar gives several examples of scientists doing this in practice, and most interestingly from my perspective he suggests that this might provide a different perspective on traditional positivism.  If positivism is viewed as a generalization of all these partial quasi-positivist projects, then Sklar suggests that some of the traditional objections to positivism will seem to be missing the point.

Since quite a number of the leading positivists were physicists (Mach, Schlick, Carnap, a good candidate for a list of the three most influential positivists, is also a list of two physicists and one person whose study of physics got to the Ph.D. candidate phase), and Sklar's examples are all drawn from physics, this interpretation may have the further virtue of reflecting what the positivists were really up to.  That would certainly explain why they always did seem to think their critics were missing the point (that was quite explicitly Carnap's attitude to the Quinean criticisms).

Comments

[Mark Olson]

I've read Hawking (somewhere) go on record that he is a positivist.

[Protagoras]

Indeed, a quick web search turned up a quote where he says exactly that, though unhelpfully the quote is given as being from page 31 without indicating of which work it is on the 31st page.