Abstract
§ 1. It has been part of the standard empiricist creed for centuries that the meaning of concepts and the meaning of statements likewise derive exclusively from their relation to experience. But only the Vienna Circle (and its intellectual subsidiaries) managed to sharpen the notion inherent in this contention. As regards the meaning of concepts, one of the relevant approaches is operationalism, developed by Percy Bridgman in the 1920’s. According to operationalism, every scientific concept obtains its meaning by being tied to a measuring procedure. The claim is that a concept’s meaning is indeed comprehensively characterized by that procedure. As Bridgman put it, “the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations” (Bridgman 1927, 5).
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© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Carrier, M. (1994). The Theory-Ladenness of Observation and Measurement. In: The Completeness of Scientific Theories. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 53. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0910-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0910-9_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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