Bas van Fraassen

Bas van Fraassen (born 1941) is a Dutch-American philosopher of science and the foremost contemporary defender of constructive empiricism, a position that occupies the precise middle ground between scientific realism and anti-realism. Van Fraassen argues that we should believe what our best scientific theories say about observable phenomena, but remain agnostic about the unobservable entities they postulate. Electrons are useful; we need not believe they are real.

His 1980 book The Scientific Image redefined the philosophy of science by shifting the debate from what