Bastiaan Cornelius Van Fraassen

Background

Van Fraassen, Bastiaan Cornelius was born on April 5, 1941 in Goes, The Netherlands.

Education

University of Alberta, Canada, and University of Pittsburg.

Career

1966-1969, Assistant Professor then Associate Professor, Yale University. 1969-1981, Associate then full Professor, University of Toronto. 1976-1982, Professor, University of Southern California.

Since 1982, Professor of Philosophy. Princeton University.

Views

Bas van Fraassen is one of the leading contemporary philosophers of science and his ‘constructive empiricism' is probably the best known and most closely argued defence of an anti-realist stance on the nature of science. While recognizing the collapse of the logical positivist programme, his strongly empiricist and antimetaphysical convictions lead him to reject the obvious realist alternative. Scientific theories aim to be true only to the extent of being empirically adequate, of saving the phenomena. The theoretical content is such only that it cou/i/constitute a true description of reality. Van Fraassen indeed recognizes a double underdetermination: that of theory by observational data, and in the interpretation of any theory. An interpretation tells us what the world could be like according to the theory. A central contention is rejection of the currently popular ‘inference to the best explanation'. Moreover, the very idea of laws of nature is dismissed as philosophically indefensible and outdated, its place being partly taken by the idea of symmetry. In Quantum Mechanics—originally to have been part of Laws and Symmetry— he defends 'the Copenhagen variant of the modal interpretation’. Real indeterminism is accepted. From the time of his doctoral dissertation under Adolf Griinbaum, van Fraassen has been keenly interested in the philosophy of time and space. Another theme has been the nature of scientific explanation; and what he termed his ‘pragmatic’ account of this in The Scientific Image has been widely discussed. Drawing on erotetic logic, he conceives of an explanation as answering a question of the form: why did A happen rather than X? Apart from philosophy of science, van Fraassen is best known for an expertise in logic, metalogic and semantics; and he advocates a semantic conception of scientific theories whereby a theory is conceived as a family of models. He was, early on, one of the main advocates of free logic, allowing for singular terms, like ‘Pegasus’, which nevertheless do not refer. Van Fraasen was editor-in-chief of the Journal of

Interests

• Philosopical logic; philosophy of time and space.

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Personal influences include Griinbaum, Sellars, Margenau, Leonard and Putnam; literary influences include Russell and Reichenbach.