Читать книгу Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science: A History (Third Edition) - Thomas J. Hickey - Страница 63

The above discussions have described the synchronic and comparative-static diachronic perspectives. Both are static, because they apply to points in time. The dynamic diachronic metalinguistic analysis not only consists of two state descriptions representing two chronologically successive language states sharing a common subset of descriptive terms in their common test design, but also exhibits a process of linguistic change between the two successive state descriptions.

Such transitions in science are the result of two functions in basic research, namely theory development and theory testing. A change of state description into a new one is produced whenever a new theory is proposed or whenever a theory is eliminated by a falsifying test outcome.