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Full Belief and Probability: Comments on Van Fraassen

Dialogue, 1997
As van Fraassen pointed out in his opening remarks, Henry Kyburg's lottery paradox has long been known to raise difficulties in attempts to represent full belief as a probability greater than or equal to p, where p is some number less than 1. Recently, Patrick Maher has pointed out that to identify full belief with probability equal to 1 presents ...
Harper, William, Hajek, Alan
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Van Fraassen's Instrumentalism

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1985
In The Scientific Image [1980], Bas van Fraassen argues against a particular form of scientific realism and for a view of his own which he dubs constructive empiricism. The version of realism he intends to refute is the view that the aim of science is to construct theories that are literally true, and that to accept a scientific theory is to believe ...
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Van Fraassen's Unappreciated Realism

Philosophy of Science, 2003
What is not often noted about Bas van Fraassen's distinctive approach to the scientific realism issue is that constructive empiricism, as he defines it, seems to involve a distinctively realist stance in regard to large parts of natural science. This apparent defection from the ranks of his more uncompromisingly anti-realist colleagues raises many ...
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VAN FRAASSEN ON THE NATURE OF EMPIRICISM

Metaphilosophy, 2007
Abstract: A traditional view is that to be an empiricist is to hold a particular epistemological belief: something to the effect that knowledge must derive from experience. In his recent book The Empirical Stance, and in a number of other publications, Bas van Fraassen has disagreed, arguing that if empiricism is to be defensible it must instead be ...
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Van Fraassen's metaphysical move

International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1991
Abstract Various aspects of van Fraassen's constructive empiricism are discussed. His concept of observability is said to have opened few unresolvable dilemmas. It is because of the confusion between observable/non‐observable and testable/metaphysical distinctions.
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Van Fraassen on Preparation and Measurement

Philosophy of Science, 1996
Van Fraassen’s 1991 modal interpretation of Quantum Mechanics offers accounts of measurement and state preparation. I argue that both accounts overlook a class of interactions I call General Unitary Measurements, or GUMs. Ironically, GUMs are significant for van Fraassen’s account of measurement because they challenge it, and significant for his ...
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Seeing the Unobservable: Van Fraassen and the Limits of Experience

Synthese, 2004
Van Fraassen maintains that the information that we canglean from experience is limited to those entities and processes that are detectable bymeans of our unaided senses. His challenge to the realist, I suggest, is that the attemptto inferentially transcend those limits amounts to a reversion to rationalism.
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On Accepting Van Fraassen's Image of Science

Philosophy of Science, 1984
In his book, The Scientific Image, van Fraassen lucidly draws an alternative to scientific realism, which he calls “Constructive Empiricism”. In this epistemological theory, the concept of observability plays the pivotal role: acceptable theories may be believed only where what they say solely concerns observables.
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Empiricism from Ockham to van Fraassen

2021
This chapter gives a brief overview of the empiricist tradition in philosophy. Although medieval nominalism primarily was motivated by logical and semantic considerations, in retrospect it is fair to view it as an empiricist position and a natural starting point for an overview of empiricism.
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Bas van Fraassen on Religion and Knowledge

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 2006
In his recent book, The Empirical Stance (2002), Bas van Fraassen elaborates on earlier suggestions of a religious view that has striking parallels with his constructive empiricism. A particularly salient feature consists in the way in which he keeps a critical distance from theoretical formulations both in science and religion, thus preferring a ...
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