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Birth and Early Childhood.
van Fraassen was born in Goes, Netherlands during the early years of WWII. His father, a steam fitter, was forced by the occupying Nazi forces to work in a factory. After an attempt to escape from the Nazi's, threats of placement in a concentration camp kept his father working for the duration of the war. After the allied victory, the van Fraassen family immigrated to Edmonton Alberta, Canada where Bas started his high school education. -
High school and College
As a high school student, Bas read everything he could regarding religion, psychology, and philosophy. He entered the University of Alberta earning his B.A. in 1963, his M.A. in 1964. After being accepted as a grad student at both Harvard and Cambridge, Bas chose the University of Pittsburgh due to the debates regarding the philosophy of science, and he was able to study with whom he regarded as the best in the field including Adolf Grünbaum, and Wilfrid Sellars. His Ph.D. was earned in 1966. -
The Scientific Image
Bas introduced constructive empiricism in his book "The Scientific Image". He re-imagined empiricism in a scientific context, and by adopting realist semantics, he avoided many of the challenges faced by logical empiricism. His position holds that the aim of science is empirical adequacy, where “a theory is empirically adequate exactly if what it says about the observable things and events in the world, is true” van Fraassen, 1980 The Scientific Image, Oxford, UK. Oxford University Press -
The Empirical Stance
In his 2002 work, Bas answered questions like what is empiricism and what could it be? He also stated about beliefs "We should not, in our philosophical capacity, form beliefs about what the world contains. As philosophers, we can have stances, but not beliefs. Scientists, and other “objectifying inquirers” who restrict themselves to observing and theorizing about entities in particular domains, are entitled to beliefs. But philosophy should not try to model itself on science." -
Major Works
The Empirical Stance, Yale University Press, 2002. Laws and Symmetry, Oxford University Press 1989. The Scientific Image, Oxford University Press 1980. Derivation and Counterexample: An Introduction to Philosophical Logic (with Karel Lambert), Dickenson Publishing Company, Inc. 1972. Formal Semantics and Logic, Macmillan, New York 1971. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Time and Space, Random House, New York 1970
