Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-fv566 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-21T12:25:43.723Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Constructive Empiricism and Anti-Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Sam Mitchell
Sam Mitchell*
Affiliation:
University of California-San Diego
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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.

References

Churchland, P. and Hooker, C. (eds.) (1985). Images of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Dummett, M.A.E. (1978). Truth and Other Enigmas. London: Duckworth.Google Scholar
Hacking, I. (1983). Representing and Intervening. Cambridge: Cambridge University PressCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Putnam, H. (1981). Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511625398CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Putnam, H. (1983). Realism and Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511625275CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sklar, L.(1974). Space, Time, and Spacetime. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Sklar, L. (1980). “Semantic Analogy.” Philosophical Studies 38: 217–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Fraassen, B.C. (1980). The Scientific Image. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.10.1093/0198244274.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar