Book Description
In this book van Fraassen develops an alternative to scientific realism by constructing and evaluating three mutually reinforcing theories. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Wonderfully important book
This is a must read for anyone wishing to sincerely engage in philosophy of science. It should change the way you think about science, but it does not deny anything essential to science. Just so you know, Van Fraassen is a Catholic, so he does seem to believe in unobservable entities, though he denies that empirical science as it is commonly understood can tell us anything about them directly.

A book on very contemporary philosophy of science
In this book, van Fraassen put forth a 'constructive empiricist' anti-realist account of science. The book contains many metaphors and even a short story. Yet it is often unclear whether he is prescribing norms for scientists, and merely describing their practice. (This may result from his counterfactual account, which strangely seems to warrant belief in propositions containing terms allegedly referring to unobservables that have nevertheless not been observed. At best, the account makes perfect agnosticism preferable to belief-formation with respect to propositions containing unobservable terms, where such prescriptions are justified on the basis of something other than facts.) The book represents what positivist philosophy might have become in the absence of thinkers who were more sensitive to the subtleties between the philosophy of language and ontology.

van fraassen's endorsement of unobservable entities
bas van fraassen in claiming to offer a viable alternativve to scientific realism has indirectly acknowledgedthe existence of unobservable entities in saying that we will nnot know eveything there is to know or everything thaat can be known in the universe/life.As an empiricist or form of it he generously engages the dicourse that unobservable entities DO have meaning but that they cant exist because any such admission would be a saving of realist theory(scientific realism posits the view that these objects have not only existence but meaning too).scientific realism is optimistic in that it belives that everything can be known or discovered by advocating this view of science,but vF rejcts this but by doing so he has created an entity that will remain forever unknowable to the mind,an unobsevable entity technically if nothing else he creates their existence and this is contrary to his position. paul neilan an NUIG student.

An attack on then and still fashionable scientific realism.
Bas van Fraassen rejects the current trend in philosophy of science toward scientific realism.In this book, he advocates something he calls constructive empiricism as an alternative; his constructive empiricism has a neo-positivist feel to it, but the development of his own position is not the most interesting aspect of this book.His criticisms of scientific realism, which really form the heart of the work, are extremely detailed, forceful, and interesting; they present a challenge which, after a decade and a half, scientific realists have yet to meet. ... Read more

Book Description
What is empiricism and what could it be? Bas C. van Fraassen, one of the world's foremost contributors to philosophical logic and the philosophy of science, here undertakes a fresh consideration of these questions and offers a program for renewal of the empiricist tradition. ... Read more

Book Description
After introducing the empiricist point of view in philosophy of science, and the concepts and methods of the semantic approach to scientific theories, Professor van Fraassen discusses quantum theory in three stages.He first examines the question of whether and how empirical phenomena require a non-classical theory, and what sort of theory they require.He then discusses the mathematical foundations of quantum theory with special reference to developments in the modelling of interaction, composite systems, and measurement.Finally, the author broaches the main questions of interpretation.After offering a critique of earlier interpretations, he develops a new one - the modal interpretation - which attempts to stay close to the original Copenhagen ideas without implying a radical incompleteness in quantum theory.He again gives special attention to the character of composite,many-body systems and especially to the peculiar character of assemblies of identical particles in quantum statistics. ... Read more

Book Description
Thirteen specially written essays discuss topics from the work of Bas van Fraassen, one of the most important contemporary philosophers of science.The central and unifying theme of the volume is empiricism, an approach which van Fraassen developed most fully in iThe Scientific Image/i and iThe Empirical Stance/i.Thirteen of the world's leading experts in the field examine van Fraassen's defence of scientific anti-realism (which he sees as a core tenet of empiricism), as well as his claim that adopting a philosophical position like empiricism does not consist in holding a particular set of beliefs, but is rather a matter of taking a istance/i.iImages of Empiricism/iconcludes with an extensive and intriguing reply by van Fraassen, in which he develops and corrects his old views, and offers new insights into the nature of science, empiricism, and philosophy itself. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Review of Metaphysics, published by Philosophy Education Society, Inc. on June 1, 2004. The length of the article is 896 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Van Fraassen, Bas C. The Empirical Stance.(Book Review)
Author: Paul O'Grady
Publication: The Review of Metaphysics (Refereed)
Date: June 1, 2004
Publisher: Philosophy Education Society, Inc.
Volume: 57Issue: 4Page: 870(3)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description
Metaphysicians speak of laws of nature in terms of necessity and universality; scientists do so in terms of symmetry and invariance.This book argues that no metaphysical account oflaws can succeed.The author analyses and rejects the arguments that there are laws of nature, or that we must believe that there are.He argues that we should discard the idea of law as an inadequate clue to science.After exploring what this means for general epistemology, the book develops the empiricist view of science as a construction of models to represent the phenomena.Concepts of symmetry, transformation, and invariance illuminate the structure of such models.A central role is played in science by symmetry arguments, and it is shown how these function also in the philosophical analysis of probability.The advocated approach presupposes no realism about laws or necessities in nature. ... Read more

Book Description
Extensively classroom-tested, this text provides an accessible and carefully structured introduction to modal and many-valued logic. The authors cover the basic formal frameworks, as well as considering a variety of philosophical issues surrounding 'possibilities and paradox'. In order to aid understanding, each chapter provides the following features: exercises to give students hands-on experience, examples to demonstrate the application of concepts and a list of further readings. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A decent introductory text
A decent introductory text on non-classical logic. Not for those who wish to make a technical study of many-valued or modal logic - the focus lies on philosophical motivations for departure from classical logic rather than formal development. The writing is sometimes stilted and obscure. Though the final section, entitled 'Metatheory', provides some excellent tools for advanced study (matrices, functional completeness, completeness in many-valued logic, decidability in modal logic), it is discrepant, in terms of technical ability required, from preceding sections.

Not for the faint of heart, but a valuable resource nonetheless.
In Possibilities and Paradox, J.C. Beall and Bas Van Fraassen team up to present a rigorous introduction to modal and many-valued logic.After presenting a brief motivation for the development of modal logic (chapter 1), the authors provide a discussion of set theory (chapter 2), logical semantics (chapter 3), the tableau or "tree" method of proof (chapter 4), normal modal logics (chapter 5), and intuitionistic and non-normal modal logics (chapter 6).These chapters prepare the reader for future topics, including many-valued logics (chapter 7), the Sorites and Liar paradoxes (chapter 8), and supervaluations and continuum-valued logics (chapter 9).The final section is devoted to metatheory and includes further tools for understanding and working with, among other things, functions, sentences, and soundness and completeness proofs.

For the student with only a basic logic course or two under his or her belt, Possibilities and Paradox is going to be a tough read.Despite its brevity (233 total pages), the book is extremely information dense--the philosophical equivalent of Grape Nuts cereal, if you will.Virtually every sentence of every chapter contains an essential point or concept that merits a careful reading, re-reading, re-re-reading, and perhaps two or three readings on top of that before an exam if it is a required text, as it was in my case.While this makes the book exemplary when it comes to an efficient presentation of the material, since it is an introductory text it would have benefited from at least three additional features.First, I would have liked to see the authors provide more of a "big picture" framework for approaching the mechanics of logic- what a good logical language should do, why we'd want a syntax to work a certain way, etc.The authors do a fairly good job of this in the later chapters, but bit more attention to this in the first three or four would make the book even more accessible to students.Second, a chapter or two on proofs would be especially helpful to students without a strong background in this aspect of logic; something like a brief, modal and many-valued version of Daniel Velleman's, How to Prove It.Finally, a chapter or two on quantification would be a nice addition to future editions of the book.

One last thing (note well): as of the writing of this review, a helpful list of corrections to various errata is available on professor Van Fraassen's website. ... Read more

Book Description
Bas C. van Fraassen presents an original exploration of how we represent the world. 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. Scientific Representationbegins 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 Renaissance, and the geometric styles of modelling in modern physics. Starting with Mach's and Poincare's analyses of measurement and the 'problem of coordination', van Fraassen then presents a view of measurement outcomes as representations. With respect to the theories of contemporary science he defends an empiricist structuralist version of the 'picture theory' of science, through an inquiry into the paradoxes that came to light in twentieth-century philosophies of science. Van Fraassen concludes with an analysis of the complex relationship between appearance and reality in the scientific world-picture. ... Read more