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Two Kinds of Observation: Why van Fraassen Was Right to Make a Distinction, but Made the Wrong One

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Sara Vollmer
Sara Vollmer*
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte
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Abstract

van Fraassen's constructivist empiricist account of theories makes an epistemic distinction between entities that can and cannot be observed with the naked eye. A belief about the correctness of a theoretical description of an entity that is observable with the naked eye can be warranted by a theory. In contrast, no theory can warrant a belief about the correctness of a description of an unobservable entity.

I argue that we ought to instead adopt a view that takes account of the fact that some entities that cannot be observed with the naked eye can nevertheless be observed on the basis of the same physical principle as those entities that can be. This suggests that there is a distinction different from van Fraassen's that might do the work van Fraassen intends his to do, but a distinction that is principled. Understanding why this is so suggests that his distinction is grounded merely in human chauvinism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 67 , Issue 3 , September 2000 , pp. 355 - 365
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Send requests for reprints to the author, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Wilhelmstr. 44, D-10117 Berlin Germany.

‡

Many thanks to Fred Suppe for his help with the basic idea behind this paper, for his encouragement on the dissertation of which an early version of the paper is a part, and for many useful suggestions. Thanks to Nancy Hall for her unstinting encouragement and her editorial help and discussions, and to Ray Martin, Victor Day, Cindy Day and Jung Ja Kim; thanks also to Ursula Klein and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin for financial support during the later stages of this work.

References

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van Fraassen, Bas. C. (1985), “Empiricism in the Philosophy of Science”, in Churchland, Paul M. and Hooker, Clifford A., (ed.), Images of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 245–308.Google Scholar