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Birth
From Encyclopedia, "Bas van Fraassen was born in Goes, in the Netherlands, on April 5. He lived in Holland until he was fifteen years old, when he moved with his family to Canada. from Wikipedia, "Van Fraassen was born in the German-occupied Netherlands on 5 April 1941. His father, a steam fitter, was forced by the Nazis to work in a factory in Hamburg. After the war, the family reunited and emigrated to Edmonton, in western Canada." If any, Bas Van Fraassen has gone through so much in life. -
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philosophical logic phase
Fraassen can be seen building several proposals guided by techniques from philosophical logic. For example, van Fraassen's method of "supervaluations", where truth comes out even if it is made up wrong, is used for the philosophy of the Liar ("This sentence is not true"). Van Fraassen's early work on space-time theories uses empiricism with the development of space-time theories that don't presuppose proof of absolute space (1970). Source: encyclopedia.com -
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Constructive empiricist period
This is a view on the search for empirical theories. The constructive empiricist finds an alternative to scientific realism that gets rid of errors of logical positivism. As opposed to logical positivism, the constructive empiricist takes scientific theories literally; there's no attempt to reconstruct such theories in some formal language. Source: Encyclopedia.com -
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Empirical stance Phase (present)
Instead of articulating empiricism as a doctrine (a set of beliefs), van Fraassen insists that empiricism should be conceptualized as a stance: an attitude, an epistemic policy. This move has several advantages. It avoids the incoherence of certain earlier empiricist proposals that failed to meet their own empiricist standards and ended up being meaningless or lacking any content. Source: Encyclopedia.com
