Bas van Fraassen Quotes on Knowledge
Bas van Fraassen’s The Scientific Image (1980), Laws and Symmetry (1989), and The Empirical Stance (2002) give late twentieth-century analytic philosophy of science its most influential statement of constructive empiricism. The central thesis is that the proper aim of science is empirical adequacy — the saving of the observable phenomena — rather than the literal truth of theories about the unobservable: acceptance of a scientific theory commits the agent to the empirical adequacy of the theory and the use of its conceptual resources for further inquiry, but not to the existence of the theoretical entities the theory posits beyond the observable. The framework, developed against the prevailing scientific realism of his Princeton contemporaries, shaped the contemporary analytic philosophy of science and the broader debate over realism, models, and scientific representation.
Quotes
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Attributed to Bas van Fraassen:
“The aim of science is to give us theories that are empirically adequate; truth about the unobservable is a bonus we cannot guarantee.”
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Attributed to Bas van Fraassen:
“Constructive empiricism is realism's twin, distinguished only by the question of what is to be believed.”
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Attributed to Bas van Fraassen:
“To accept a theory is not to believe it true; it is to commit to using it for empirical inquiry.”
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Attributed to Bas van Fraassen:
“Empiricism is a stance, not a doctrine; it is the discipline of asking what experience can support.”
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Attributed to Bas van Fraassen:
“The image of science is what philosophy of science properly studies; the science is for the scientists.”