ABSTRACT
It is perhaps a common place to say that the debate on the nature of scientific theories in contemporary philosophy of science has mainly revolved around the syntax-semantics debate. During the first half of the twentieth century, when the Logical Empiricist program flourished, a version of the syntactical approach ruled. During the second half of the twentieth century, after the development of model theory by Tarski and the decline of the Vienna Circle, the semantic approach was developed and still forms the actual paradigm. However, a closer look would reveal that apart from the story of a heated dispute, there was not really a debate: after the decline of the Received View—as the approach by the Logical Empiricists to scientific theories was called—almost no one else was really promoting that kind of view, so it is strange that philosophers of science adhering to the semantic approach took as part of their tasks to criticize what they took to be the syntactic approach.
