Sharif Digital Repository

In an official announcement during the inaugural speech in 2012, where Hempel Award presented on behalf of the Philosophy of Science Association to Bas van Fraassen for “a lifetime scholarly achievement in the philosophy of science”, it was said that, “van Fraassen advocates a semantic approach to scientific theories and, on that basis, urges skepticism regarding laws of nature, anti-realism regarding unobservables, and pragmatism regarding explanation” (Gonzalez 2014, 5). van Fraassen’s approach to unobservable entities has a crucial role in his philosophy of science and also in this dissertation. The aim here is to defend van Fraassen’s claim based upon the distinction he makes between... 

Earlier in the philosophical tradition, the realists’ view that world exist in itself, independently of our knowledge, had been challenged by idealists, who denied such existence and considered the world and its objects as a function of (our) perception. Today, some philosophers have challenged the (scientific) realists’ belief in the existence of scientific unobservable entities, such as electrons, quarks, forces, gravitational fields, cells, bacteria, genes and so on, that are posited by the modern scientific theories. The debates which have been made in this regard, in recent decades, have spurred an important controversy known as “scientific realism and antirealism debate” in the field... 

Past theory-changes in science were sometimes accompanied by radical conceptual shifts. This has urged some philosophers of science to project the same possibility onto current theories and suspend belief in the conceptual parts of our current best scientific theories. This type of argument is called the “pessimistic induction” (PI) and is often used by scientific anti-realists. Scientific realists, on the other hand, have argued against PI, by insisting that past theory-changes were not as radical as anti-realists suggest, as well as by appealing to the differences between current and past science. In recent decades, anti-realists, such as Kyle Stanford and Brad Wray, have renewed the... 

The importance of the issue of laws of nature is obvious so that some say the purpose of science is discovering the laws of nature. In his “laws and symmetry” (1989) van Fraassen takes an antirealistic position toward the laws. His project is to clear science from metaphysics, and since the notion of laws of nature has heavy metaphysical presuppositions it should be eliminated from the literature of science. He tries to provide three kinds of arguments against the notion of laws: first, historical arguments, second, arguing in favor of insufficiency of all presented accounts of laws, and third, rejecting the tasks that accounts of laws should do. In van Frassen’s view, studies of science... 

One of the main arguments between scientific realists and scientific anti-realists is about observability. As a prominent anti-realist, van Fraassen and his theory of constructive empiricism and his views on observability and the use of scientific instruments, have been the subject of many debates. He believes that observation is the sole path to knowledge and observation is only possible through unaided human eye, so seeing through scientific instruments like microscopes does not count as observation, therefore the information gained from these procedures are not necessarily true.This thesis not only examines van Fraassen’s outlooks on the matter, but also examines his opponents’ view and... 

Different views and approaches have been adopted regarding the nature of scientific theories in the philosophy of science, which can be generally divided into two main parts: A) Syntactic (linguistic) approach, which is also called the traditional or received view, B) Semantic approach (model-based view).The main and dominant idea in the syntactic view, first proposed by logical empricists is that a scientific theory is an axiomatic system in a formal language (first-order language) that is subject to deduction and is partially interpreted by a set of correspondence rules. This view has been the subject of numerous attacks and criticisms since the 1960s, after which an alternative approach,...