Formal Philosophy of Science: Statement and Set-theoretic Approaches

The so-called received view of scientific theory, initially proposed by logical positivists, represented scientific theory as a set of statements of some formal language, ordered by syntactic relation of deductive derivability. By late 1960s this strategy had met with severe criticism which called into question the effectiveness of formal methods in philosophy of science. The set-theoretic (semantic) approach in formal philosophy of science, which can be treated as natural development of received view, is based on the concept of model in Tarski’s sense and is capable of neutralizing the most part of these objections.