Elective Empiricism or Parsimonious Pyrrhonism? Vetting van Fraassen’s Voluntarism

Abstract

Bas van Fraassen’s ‘Constructive Empiricism’, first presented in The Scientific Image, has rightly stimulated widespread, searching discussion and rejoinder. Yet something very fundamental remains to be appreciated about his Constructive Empiricism and how he advocates it. I say ‘advocates’ advisedly, not only because van Fraassen’s view is voluntarist, in exactly the voluntarist strain of fideism tracing back to Augustine, but because his core strategy is quasi-pyrrhonist. To exhibit how so, and why it matters philosophically, I first briefly review some main Pyrrhonian tropes, the Dilemma of the Criterion and Pyrrhonism’s key basis step (§2).² I then summarise my reasons for suggesting that van Fraassen constructs his ‘new’ empiricism with quasi-Pyrrhonist equipollence strategies (§3). To substantiate my suggestion, I recount van Fraassen’s empiricist stance (§4), his own sceptical tropes (§5), and the key basis step of his Constructive Empiricism (§6). I conclude by reflecting philosophically upon method, scepticism, and the philosophical importance of philosophical history (§7). Despite the ‘retreat’ from The Scientific Image announced in an appendix to Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective,³ the same basic Pyrrhonist tendencies persist throughout van Fraassen’s empiricist stance. Van Fraassen, of course, calls his view ‘the empirical stance’, yet he is chronically cavalier or mistaken about so many central empirical matters that his stance is not empirical, but throughout is merely an empiricist stance redux.