van Fraassen, Bas

Bas is Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. (He is retiring and taking a tenured appointment at San Francisco State University.) A philosopher of science who was born in the Netherlands, he coined the term “constructive empiricism” and has worked on the philosophy of quantum mechanics, philosophical logic, and the nature of scientific rules or laws. One of the questions on which he works is, What is empiricism, and what could it be? Here is what he says. “I see first of all a pattern of recurrent rebellion against metaphysics, to be guided by the empirical sciences as a paradigm of rational inquiry. They appear also in the not unrelated ruptures between the traditionally religious and increasingly secular orientation of Western philosophy. Empiricism has often been closely associated with philosophical materialism and secularism. I distinguish empiricism clearly from materialism; but does empiricism, as now presented, allow for anything other than a secular orientation? In view of the intimate connections with empirical science of both the empiricist tradition and the 19th century roots of secularism, the answer might seem to lie in \"science and religion\" studies, currently a distinct academic region. These studies strike me as mainly irrelevant, if not altogether mistaken in intent. To answer the question we need to understand what it is to be secular, and therefore the strong historical and conceptual relationship between that orientation and the sciences…. Objective inquiry appears to be among the actual conditions for much of the sciences\' empirical success. But they do not imply the sort of completeness claims for the enterprise that are here at issue. So the characteristically secular insistence that there is nothing to be known or learned that cannot be disclosed by such inquiry goes beyond what involvement in the sciences requires or implies. Hence my contention that empiricists need not embrace a secular orientation.”