Language and Theory Choice: Against the Official History

Abstract

The official history of neopositivism, in particular with respect to R. Carnap’s proposals about the acceptance-rejection of theories, holds that “Carnap [intended] to avoid (or evade) the idea [...] that values [...] are presuposed in the activity of selecting scientific theories [...] Carnap wanted to reduce theory choice to an algorithm” (Putnam 2002, p. 141). Such a history usually appears in textbooks on positivism and/or on history of the philosophy of science as well as in critical approaches to empirism in general and to Carnap in particular. In the present paper, we will argue that Carnap explicitly did not carry out such a reduction and did not intend to avoid the presence of value judgements, although of a very special kind.