On the Nature and Norms of Acceptance and Belief

Abstract

Constructive empiricism — as articulated and defended by van Fraassen — is intended as but a component of a broader picture of our epistemic lives; it is a conservative assessment of the aim of science motivated not so much by scepticism at our ability to acquire knowledge about the unobservable as it is by a particular orientation towards explanation, a visceral disinclination for speculative metaphysics and a permissive conception of rationality that demands no greater license for a philosophical position than its logical consistency. And initially, this voluntarist framework appeared to provide the ideal habitat for van Fraassen’s empiricism. The most pressing objection facing a position that claims that the acceptance of a scientific theory involves as belief only that it is empirically adequate is that, since there appears to be no principled epistemological distinction between what our theories say about the very large (but extraordinarily distant) and what they say about the very small (but routinely detected), any justification we may have for believing a theory to be empirically adequate will also be justification for believing that theory to be true. But the constructive empiricist is not offering us an argument concerning the warrant of our various scientific beliefs — he is offering us an alternative conception of the scientific enterprise against a background epistemological framework that rejects all questions of justification as ultimately an expression of taste.