Foreign thinker
Bas van Fraassen
Bas van FraassenPhilosophy of scienceDutch-American
Science aims to give us theories which are empirically adequate.
Life and Thought
Bas van Fraassen is a Dutch-American philosopher and one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy of science. He is best known for “constructive empiricism,” a view opposed to scientific realism that takes the aim of science to be the empirical adequacy of theories, not necessarily their complete truth about unobservable entities.
Bas van Fraassen was born in 1941 in the Netherlands and later studied and taught philosophy in North America. He has held academic positions at universities such as Yale, Toronto, the University of Southern California, Princeton, and San Francisco State University.
Van Fraassen’s main reputation comes from The Scientific Image, the book in which he formulated the theory of constructive empiricism. According to this view, accepting a scientific theory does not mean believing all its claims about unobservable entities to be true; rather, it means believing that the theory is empirically adequate, that is, that it can correctly explain and predict observable phenomena.
Van Fraassen defends an empiricist position against scientific realism, but combines this empiricism with precise analyses of models, scientific laws, probability, explanation, and the structure of theories. He has also written important works in philosophy of physics, logic, epistemology, and scientific representation.
His well-known works include The Scientific Image, Laws and Symmetry, Quantum Mechanics: An Empiricist View, The Empirical Stance, and Scientific Representation. His thought is central to debates about scientific realism, anti-realism, observability, and the limits of scientific knowledge.
