ABSTRACT
In this chapter we discuss a family of approaches that take theories to be linguistic objects: descriptions of their subject matter. The vision of this view, which was developed by logical empiricists, has become known as the Syntactic View of Theories or the Received View of Theories. The view faces a number of difficult questions, and it has been confronted with a number of criticisms: that the view is committed to a system of logic that is too weak to capture the mathematics of scientific theories; that the view regards theories as syntactical items bare of any semantics; that it both hinders and misconstrues scientific progress; that it is committed to absurd identity criteria for theories; and that it fails to capture what theories look like in scientific practice. We argue that these objections are based on misunderstandings, misattributions, and non-sequiturs, and that they fail to undermine the Received View. This justifies taking the view seriously and following some of its important developments closely.
