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Constructive Empiricism and Anti-Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Sam Mitchell
Sam Mitchell*
Affiliation:
University of California-San Diego
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Extract

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Van Fraassen stresses two distinct but interrelated themes in The Scientific Image: the semantic view of theories and the epistemic status of unobservables. The first of these could easily be accepted by a scientific realist, and indeed realists like Giere have already adapted it to their purposes. So the specifically empiricist thread in van Fraassen’s philosophy stems from the second.

Van Fraassen breaks from tradition in founding his empiricism not on the ontological status of unobservable entities but on the epistemic attitude we take to them. The main points of his position are these:

  1. 1) The claims of scientific theories, including claims about unobservable entities, are to be taken literally. Theories are not reconstructed so as to remove claims of the existence of unobservable objects.

  2. 2) Observation is a matter of direct observation by accepted participants in the human scientific community.

Type
Part VI. Realism
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1988 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1988 , 1988 , pp. 174 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1988

Footnotes

1

I’m grateful to Stephen Stich, Lisa Lloyd, Philip Kitcher, Mike Bishop, Warren Dow, and Mike Dietrich for their help with this paper.

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