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Acceptance Without Belief

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Patrick Maher
Patrick Maher*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign
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Extract

Bas van Fraassen (1980) maintained that acceptance of a scientific theory does not involve belief that the theory is true, though it does involve belief that the theory is empirically adequate. This provoked a large literature attempting to refute van Fraassen’s position. For the most part, the critics attempted to show that van Fraassen’s position violates principles of inductive inference, or of rationality.2 Such criticisms do not question the possibility of conforming to van Fraassen’s conception of science; they merely argue that there is good reason not to do so.

But some of van Fraassen’s critics have taken a different tack. Simon Blackburn (1984, p. 223) has remarked, and Sam Mitchell (1988) and Paul Horwich (forthcoming) have argued, that acceptance of a theory, as understood by van Fraassen, is the same as believing the theory to be true. If this is right, then what van Fraassen is advocating is a logically contradictory position, and thus one to which it is impossible to conform.

Type
Part VII. Realism
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1990 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1990 , 1990 , pp. 380 - 392
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1990

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Footnotes

1

This paper was written while I was a fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows. I have profited from comments by Janette Maher and the anonymous referee.

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