What are the eplstemolog leal virtues that we value In scientific theories? In The Scientific Image. Bas van Fraassen (1980) argues that the preeminent virtue Is empirical adequacy: the capacity of a theory to “save the phenomena”. In an Intuitive sense a theory Is empirically adequate if “What It says about the observable things and events in this world is true.” This point of view, according to which the eplstemologlcal aim of science is to save the phenomena, van Fraassen calls constructive empiricism. In an earlier “constructive critique” of constructive empiricism (1983), I argued that there were serious problems In van Fraassen's proposal for extending the notion of empirical adequacy to statistical theories. In that paper I suggested an alternative definition for the empirical adequacy of a simple statistical hypothesis: roughly speaking, the idea Is that a simple statistical hypothesis Is empirically adequate provided that there does not exist another simple hypothesis which has a higher likelihood relative to the set of all phenomena (past, present, and future) In the actual world.