ABSTRACT
The Received View assumes that a theory’s descriptive vocabulary is bifurcated into observation terms and theoretical terms. This bifurcation has been confronted with three families of criticism: that the epistemic distinction between what we can and cannot observe does not translate into a linguistic distinction between terms of different kinds; that there is no clear boundary between what is observable and what is unobservable; and that observation is theory-laden because theories are always implicated in observations. We examine these criticisms and then discuss an alternative bifurcation that draws the line between antecedently understood terms and new terms. We then analyse the process of gathering data in experiments and their transformation into a data model.
