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Theory Construction and Experiment: An Empiricist View

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2022

Bas C. van Fraassen
Bas C. van Fraassen*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

The empiricism/realism debates have been going on now for so long, in so many philosophical arenas, that any simple statement of the issue is bound to be wrong or biased. Yet we need a simple formulation to begin, if only to know who is meant to pick up which gauntlet. I shall begin with a short sketch of how I see the enterprise of philosophy of science, and then I shall describe what I take to be good empiricist views on two subjects: theory construction and experimentation. At the end I shall sum up with a simple recasting of the main points at issue.

Within philosophy, the philosophy of science is comparable to philosophy of law, philosophy of art, of religion, of mathematics. These disciplines are comparable in that each has as subject matter a large-scale cultural phenomenon, with its associated activities, institutions, products, language, and internal standards of evaluation.

Type
Part XII. Scientific Realism
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1980 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1980 , 1980 , pp. 663 - 678
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

Research for this paper was supported by National Science Foundation grant SES-8005827. Some parts of the paper have inevitably become summaries of parts of my book The Scientific Image, but I have expanded on those ideas in a way suitable for the present more specialized audience. All publications referred to in the body of the text will be found listed by author in the Bibliography (for each reference all cited works by that author are intended) except that Beltrametti and van Fraassen (1981) is a general reference for incidentally mentioned work on foundations on quantum mechanics.

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