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Beginnings
Born Bastiaan Cornelis van Fraassen in Goes, Netherlands -
Journal of Philosophy
Published "Singular Terms, Truth-value Gaps, and Free Logic" where he indicates that, however, he sees no good reason to call statements which employ them either true or false. Some have attempted to solve this problem by means of many-valued logics; van Fraassen offers in their stead the use of supervaluations. Questions of completeness change when supervaluations are admitted, since they allow for valid arguments that do not correspond to logically true conditionals. -
The Scientific Image
"Widely credited with rehabilitating scientific anti-realism" and coined "constructive empiricism" in which he argued for agnosticism about the reality of unobservable entities." The constructive empiricist follows the logical positivists in rejecting metaphysical commitments in science, but parts with them regarding their endorsement of the verificationist criterion of meaning, as well as their endorsement of the suggestion that theory-laden discourse can and should be removed from science. -
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Awards and Recognition
John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (1970–71),Matchette Prize of the American Philosophical Association (1982), Imre Lakatos Award (1986), Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities at Princeton (1995), Immanuel Kant Lectures at Stanford (1995), Elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1997), The Terry Lectures at Yale (1999), John Locke Lectures at Oxford (2000–01) -
Laws and Symmetry
Tried to explain physical phenomena without assuming that such phenomena are caused by rules or laws which can be said to cause or govern their behavior. He argued for the possibility that theories could have empirical equivalence but differ in their ontological commitments. He rejects the notion that the aim of science is to produce an account of the physical world that is literally true and instead maintains that its aim is to produce theories that are empirically adequate.
