Bas van FraassenPrinceton University and State University of San Francisco
Bas van Fraassen
Doctor of Philosophy
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Introduction
Bas Van Fraassen is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Princeton University. Bas does research in Philosophy of Science and Logic. A recent publication in philosophy of science is 'Misdirection and Misconception in the Scientific Realism Debates.' Current research concerns deontic logic, logic of conditionals, and various paradoxes in philosophical logic, with regular post appearing in https://basvanfraassensblog.home.blog/
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (264)
The 1960s saw many revolutions, worldwide, and some of that epoch's revolutionary spirit manifested itself in philosophy of science, with strong reactions against the dominant 'received view' of Logical Positivism. Scientific realism emerged to dispute ontology, Kuhn single-handedly turned our eyes back to history of science, and the semantic appro...
Rescorla explores the relation between Reflection, Conditionalization, and Dutch book arguments in the presence of a weakened concept of sure loss and weakened conditions of self‐transparency for doxastic agents. The literature about Reflection and about Dutch Book arguments, though overlapping, are distinct, and its history illuminates the import...
Philosophical issues often turn into logic. That is certainly true of Moore’s Paradox, which tends to appear and reappear in many philosophical contexts. There is no doubt that its study belongs to pragmatics rather than semantics or syntax. But it is also true that issues in pragmatics can often be studied fruitfully by attending to their projecti...
Philosophical issues often turn into logic. That is certainly true of Moore's Paradox, which tends to appear and reappear in many philosophical contexts. There is no doubt that its study belongs to pragmatics rather than semantics or syntax. But it is also true that issues in pragmatics can often be studied fruitfully by attending to their projecti...
To what extent can literary theory help us in philosophy of science and epistemology? A reflection on Umberto Eco's theory of the intentio operis.
Published in the journal Versus, vol. 85/86/87; 2000.
Apesar das décadas de debate sobre o realismo científico, nos encontramos confusos com o que exatamente diferentes filósofos(as) parecem pensar o que isso é. Ele requer algum tipo de crença em relação às teorias científicas e, se sim, qual tipo? Ele está anteriormente tipificado por uma certa compreensão da racionalidade de tais crenças? No diálogo...
Moore’s Paradox engendered various proposals for aspects of the logic of be- lief, both for believers to avoid falling into its form of incoherence and for special principles to serve as axioms or rules for doxastic logic. The proposal here devel- oped is to study the logic pertaining to believers who are self-transparent in the sense that, althoug...
Early twentieth century views of science as representation
Halvorson’s book’s real achievement is that it is both a source and a challenge, and not just for philosophers of science. I will begin with some notes to add to Halvorson’s discussion of supervenience and definability. Then secondly I will engage the book’s way of dealing with empirical content. Extension of formal methods to the relation of theor...
ABSTRACT. Naturalism is often presented as a methodological assumption, that the best way to find things out is by empirical means. But since no one doubts this, we understand it at once as signaling that there is nothing else to be found out in any case. That links the methodological dictum at once to Naturalism understood as the ontological view...
Published as part of the book symposium: Philosophical Studies 70 (2010): 511-514. https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anq042 Science represents natural phenomena concretely by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations, as well as more abstractly by theories and mathematical models. In the decades around 1900, the Bildth...
Since having language is a central and crucial aspect of what I am, it is literally and logically impossible for me to have a complete or fully adequate answer to the question “What am I?” The I is transcendent in the strong sense that the I is not only never entirely captured by our representations in fact, but is beyond the very possibility of fu...
First published 1970 by Random House; second edition published 1985 by Columbia University Press. Copyright reverted to author in 2015. This is electronic edition prepared since then
Decades of debate about scientific realism notwithstanding, we find ourselves bemused by what different philosophers appear to think it is, exactly. Does it require any sort of belief in relation to scientific theories and, if so, what sort? Is it rather typified by a certain understanding of the rationality of such beliefs? In the following dialog...
The scientific realism debates have been plagued by misrepresentations of both realist and empiricist positions, sometimes by their adherents as well as by their critics. When positions are presented as contraries, there must be an isolatable question to which each gives its answer, in opposition to the other. Since philosophy does not provide a wa...
Associated with the Copenhagen school, the External Observation View of quantum mechanics depicted a quantum state as evolving deterministically, but with interruptions when ‘collapsed’ by measurement interactions. I will point to an analogy with the doxastic state studied in epistemology, and show that this analogy suggests an application of the q...
For changing opinion, represented by an assignment of probabilities to propositions, the criterion proposed is motivated by the requirement that the assignment should have, and maintain, the possibility of matching in some appropriate sense statistical proportions in a population. This ‘tracking’ criterion implies limitations on policies for updati...
Personal or subjective probability entered epistemology as a cure for certain perceived inadequacies in the traditional notion of belief. But there are severe strains in the relationship between probability and belief. They seem too intimately related to exist as separate but equal; yet if either is taken as the more basic, the other may suffer.
A scientific theory offers models for the phenomena in its domain; these models involve theoretical quantities of various sorts, and a model’s structure is the set of relations it imposes on these quantities. There is an important, indeed fundamental, demand in scientific practice that those quantities be clearly and feasibly related to measurement...
Naturalized epistemology, as advanced by Willard Van Orman Quine, appears to make epistemology merely descriptive in form, rather than normative. In striking contrast with the tradition, it appears to leave no place for value judgment in rational formation and change of opinion or belief. Some more recent forms of naturalism in epistemology are mor...
SmileyTimothy. Sense without denotation. Analysis (Oxford), n.s. no. 78 (1960), pp. 125–135. - Volume 37 Issue 2 - Bas C. van Fraassen
In recent papers Hans Halvorson has offered a critique of the semantic view of theories, showing that theories may be the same although the corresponding sets of models are different and, conversely, that theories may be different although the corresponding sets of models are the same. This critique will be assessed, first, as it pertains to issues...
Delivered on the occasion of the 2009 "Giulio Preti Prize", this lecture examines and questions the contrast between the sense of intellectual crisis in the scientific world of the first decades of the 20th century and the absence of any such sense of crisis in current philosophy. Starting in the 19the century, we were confronted with changes in pe...
In The Inference That Makes Science, Ernan McMullin recounts the clear historical progress he saw toward a vision of the sciences as conclusions reached rationally on the basis of empirical evidence. Distinctive of this vision was his view of science as driven by a specific form of inference, retroduction. To understand this properly, we need to di...
Experimental modeling is the construction of theoretical models hand in hand with experimental activity. As explained in Section 1, experimental modeling starts with claims about phenomena that use abstract concepts, concepts whose conditions of realization are not yet specified; and it ends with a concrete model of the phenomenon, a model that can...
A scientific theory offers models for the phenomena in its domain; these models involve theoretical quantities, and a model's structure is the set of relations it imposes on these quantities.Afundamental demand in scientific practice is for those quantities to be clearly and feasibly related to measurement. This demand for empirical grounding can b...
Why-questions and how-possibly-questions are two common forms of explanation request. Answers to the former ones require factual assertions, but the latter ones can be answered by displaying a representation of the targeted phenomenon. However, in an extreme case, a representation could come accompanied by the assertion that it displays the only po...
The story of how Perrin's experimental work established the reality of atoms and molecules has been a staple in (realist) philosophy of science writings (Wesley Salmon, Clark Glymour, Penelope Maddy, and so on). With this understanding, the only question is how, and by how much, Perrin's results confirmed the hypothesis that molecules are real. Pet...
Thomason (1979/2010)’s argument against competence psychologism in semantics envisages a representation of a subject’s competence as follows:
he understands his own language in the sense that he can identify the semantic content of each of its sentences, which requires
that the relation between expression and content be recursive. Then if the scien...
Carlo Rovelli's inspiring Relational Quantum Mechanics serves several aims at once: it provides a new vision of what the world of quantum mechanics is like, and it offers a program to derive the theory's formalism from a set of simple postulates pertaining to information processing. I propose here to concentrate entirely on the former, to explore t...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Carlo Rovelli’s inspiring “Relational Quantum Mechanics” serves several aims at once: it provides a new vision of what the
world of quantum mechanics is like, and it offers a program to derive the theory’s formalism from a set of simple postulates
pertaining to information processing. I propose here to concentrate entirely on the former, to explore...
Delivered on the occasion of the 2009 « Giulio Preti Prize », this lecture examines and questions the contrast between the sense of intellectual crisis in the scientific world of the first decades of the 20th century and the absence of any such sense of crisis in current philosophy. Starting in the 19the century, we were confronted with changes in...
The story of how Perrin’s experimental work established the reality of atoms and molecules has been a staple in (realist)
philosophy of science writings (Wesley Salmon, Clark Glymour, Peter Achinstein, Penelope Maddy, …). I’ll argue that how this
story is told distorts both what the work was and its significance, and draw morals for the understandi...
Today's empiricism and transcendentalism both reject metaphysics, but each appears sometimes to the other as actually engaging
in the rejected metaphysics. From an empiricist standpoint, transcendentalism seems to grant too much to the knowing subject
whereas from a transcendentalist standpoint, empiricism seems to concede too much to realism. The...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. This book begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the...
Dedicted to the memory of Peter Lipton (1954–2007), a spirited philosopher of science who left this world too early F. A. Muller & B. C. van Fraassen Dicken & Lipton (2006) argued, notably following Musgrave (1985), that a constructive empiricist cannot coherently draw the distinction between observable objects (events, processes, ...) and unobserv...
This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates...
In this journal, Dicken & Lipton [2006] argued, following Musgrave [1985], that a constructive empiricist cannot coherently draw the distinction between observable objects (events, processes, …) and unobservable ones. We argue to the contrary: the distinction can be drawn coherently, but add a qualification to deal with an associated problem concer...
This book contains thirteen specially written chapters which discuss topics from the work of Bas C. van Fraassen, one of the most important contemporary philosophers of science. The central and unifying theme of the book is empiricism, an approach which van Fraassen developed most fully in The Scientific Image and The Empirical Stance. Thirteen exp...
Structuralist views of science can be realist or empiricist but face some of the same problems. The identity of indiscernibles: if not honoured in mathematics, nevertheless required to relate mathematics to the phenomena?Metaphysics: does Ladyman's ‘radically naturalized metaphysics’ still violate empiricist scruples?'Structure is all there is’: ca...
What does it mean, to embed the phenomena in an abstract structure? Or to represent them by doing so? The semantic view of theories runs into a severe problem if these notions are construed either naively, in a metaphysical way, or too closely on the pattern of the earlier syntactic view. Constructive empiricism and structural realism will then sha...
Looking back from 2049 over one-hundred and fifty years of philosophy, a student's essay reveals what became of rival strands
in Western philosophy – with a sidelong glance at the special Topoi issue on the theme “Philosophy: What is to be Done?” that was published almost half a century earlier.
Structural realism as developed by John Worrall and others can claim philosophical roots as far back as the late 19th century, though the discussion at that time does not unambiguously favor the contemporary form, or even its realism. After a critical examination of some aspects of the historical background some severe critical challenges to both W...
Vague subjective probability may be modeled by means of a set of probability functions, so that the represented opinion has
only a lower and upper bound. The standard rule of conditionalization can be straightforwardly adapted to this. But this combination
has difficulties which, though well known in the technical literature, have not been given su...
I exist, but I am not a thing among things; X exists if and only if there is something such that it=X. This is consistent, and it is a view that can be supported. Calvino’s novel The Non-Existent Knight can be read so as to illustrate this view. But what is my relation to the things there are if I am not identical with any of them – things such as...
Science represents the phenomena and it does so by providing representations of nature with the phenomena at best as a part. Criteria of adequacy for a representation pertain to accuracy and truth; but that representation is selective and may require distortion even in the selected parameters is an old and familiar point, intimately related to the...
Symmetry considerations dominate modern fundamental physics, both in quantum theory and in relativity. This book presents a collection of philosophy-on-physics papers, first compiled in 2003, highlighting the main issues and controversies, and providing an entry into the subject for both physicists and philosophers. It covers topical issues such as...
James Ladyman has argued that constructive empiricism entails modal realism, and that this renders constructive empiricism untenable. We maintain that constructive empiricism is compatible with modal nominalism. Although the central term 'observable' has been analyzed in terms of counterfactuals, and in general counter-factuals do not have objectiv...
Constructive empiricism is indeed set squarely within a common sense realism that was foreign to much of the empiricist tradition. But I do not see this common sense realism, which I take myself to share with many scientific realists, as harboring or leading to scientific realism. That is in part because of the way I separate the opposition between...
Michel Ghins and I are both empiricists, and agree significantly in our critique of traditional empiricist epistemology. We differ however in some respects in our interpretation of the scientific enterprise. Ghins argues for a moderate scientific realism which includes the view that acceptance of a scientific theory will bring with it belief in the...
Si l'empirisme veut etre une position philosophique viable, il doit renoncer a son association traditionnelle avec les epistemologies fondation- nalistes. L'argumentation generale developpee par Paul Feyerabend en faveur de cette conclusion dans son article «Classical Empiricism» (1970) s'appuie sur un argument utilise par des jesuites du dix-septi...
After Hume, attempts to forge an empiricist epistemology have taken three forms, which I shall call the First, Middle, and Third Way. The First still attempts an a priori demonstration that our cognitive methods satisfy some (weak) criterion of adequacy. The Middle Way is pursued under the banners of naturalism and scientific realism, and aims at t...
Projects
Projects (2)
The goal is to explore alternative semantic analyses that will apply to a variety of classical and non-classical logics. The name "four logics" came from my original focus on the family: classical, intuitionistic, quantum, relevance logics. Now it includes more (and some can be brought under one heading, fitting into a single semantic analysis). At present I am concentrating on short sketches, published on my blog (https://basvanfraassensblog.home.blog/) with names such as "Hilbert logics", "An oblique look at propositions", "Deontic logic".
