How to talk about unobservables - Princeton University.pdfVIP

published in Analysis 68 (2008), 197–205. The definitive version is available at How to talk about unobservables F.A. Muller and B.C. van Fraassen January 2007 Dedicated to the memory of Peter Lipton ( 1954 −2007), An immersed philosopher of science who left this world too early. In this journal, Dicken Lipton [2006] argued, following Musgrave [1985], that a constructive empiricist cannot coherently draw the distinction between observable objects (events, processes, …) and unobservable ones. We argue to the contrary: the distinction can be drawn coherently, but add a qualification to deal with an associated problem concerning the language of science. 1. Challenges to the Notion of Empirical Adequacy The flaw in those and similar criticisms is that they proceed from the syntactic view of a scientific theory as a set of sentences in a well delineated language. In consequence they take literally the ‘rough and ready’ characterisation of empirical adequacy of a theory as ‘truth of all that the theory says about observable things’. Constructive empiricism is and has always been wedded to the semantic rather than the syntactic view, precisely because the latter affords no non-trivial concept of empirical adequacy (van Fraassen 1980: 12, 54-55). Musgrave’s argument relied on the account of empirical adequacy tied to the syntactic view of scientific theories (1985: 208). The reply offered in (van Fraassen 1985) did not satisfy Musgrave, nor did it later satisfy Muller (2004, 2005), nor, most recently, Dicken and Lipton (2006). 1 Musgrave’s original argument begins by asking us to imagine a theory T that describes the world as having some observable and some unobservable parts, and marks a difference between them. As Musgrave points out, “if we are to use T to delineate the observable, we must accept it.” (Musgra