Bas van Fraassen
Bas van Fraassen | |
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Born | reflection principle ) | 5 April 1941
Bastiaan Cornelis van Fraassen (
Biography and career
Van Fraassen was born in the German-occupied Netherlands on 5 April 1941. His father, a steam fitter, was forced by the Nazis to work in a factory in Hamburg. After the war, the family reunited and, in 1956, emigrated to Edmonton, in western Canada.[6]
Van Fraassen earned his
Van Fraassen is an adult convert to the
Among his many students are the philosophers
Philosophical work
Philosophy of science
Van Fraassen coined the term "
In his 1989 book Laws and Symmetry, van Fraassen attempted to lay the ground-work for explaining physical
Philosophical logic
Van Fraassen has been the editor of the Journal of Philosophical Logic and co-editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic.[7]
In logic, Van Frassen is best known for his work on
Instead of any unique formalization, though, he simply adjusts the axioms of a standard predicate logic such as that found in Willard Van Orman Quine's Methods of Logic. Instead of an axiom like he uses ; this will naturally be true if the existential claim of the antecedent is false. If a name fails to refer, then an atomic sentence containing it, that is not an identity statement, can be assigned a truth value arbitrarily. Free logic is proved to be complete under this interpretation.
He indicates that, however, he sees no good reason to call statements which employ them either true or false. Some have attempted to solve this problem by means of
His paper "Facts and tautological entailment" (J Phil 1969) is now regarded as the beginning of truth-maker semantics.
Bayesian epistemology
In Bayesian epistemology, van Fraassen proposed what is now known as van Fraassen's reflection principle: "to satisfy the principle, the agent's present subjective probability for proposition A, on the supposition that his subjective probability for this proposition will equal r at some later time, must equal this same number r".[18][19][20]
Books
- Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective, OUP, 2008.
- The Empirical Stance, Yale University Press, 2002.
- Quantum Mechanics: An Empiricist View, Oxford University Press, 1991.
- Laws and Symmetry, Oxford University Press 1989.
- The Scientific Image, Oxford University Press 1980.
- Derivation and Counterexample: An Introduction to Philosophical Logic (with Karel Lambert), Dickenson Publishing Company, Inc. 1972.
- Formal Semantics and Logic, Macmillan, New York 1971.
- An Introduction to the Philosophy of Time and Space, Random House, New York 1970.
See also
References
- ^ Scientific Realism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- JSTOR 20127042.
- ^ David Marshall Miller, Representing Space in the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 4 n. 2.
- ^ Free Logic (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- ^ Sandy Boucher, "Stances and Epistemology: Values, Pragmatics, and Rationality", Metaphilosophy 49(4), July 2018, pp. 521–547.
- ^ Why Science Should Stay Clear of Metaphysics, Nautilus
- ^ a b Bas C. van Fraassen, Curriculum Vitae
- ^ SF State News at SFSU
- ^ SF State Campus Memo: New tenure-track faculty 2008-09
- ^ New Blackfriars Vol. 80, No. 938, 1999.
- ^ "B.C. van Fraassen". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived from the original on 2 December 2020. Retrieved 17 July 2015.
- ^ LES MEMBRES ACTUELS DE L'A.I.P.S. Archived 2013-09-19 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Hempel Award recipients
- ^ ISSN 1095-5054. Retrieved 31 May 2018.
- ISSN 0279-0750.
- ISBN 0-520-05155-6
- ^ B. C. van Fraassen, "Singular Terms, Truth-value Gaps, and Free Logic", The Journal of Philosophy 63(17), September 1966:481–495.
- ^ B. C. van Fraassen, "Belief and the Will", The Journal of Philosophy 81(5), May 1984:235–256.
- ISSN 1095-5054. Retrieved 31 May 2018.
A. Other principles of synchronic coherence. Are the probability laws the only standards of synchronic coherence for degrees of belief? Van Fraassen has proposed an additional principle (Reflection or Special Reflection), which he now regards as a special case of an even more general principle (General Reflection).
- ^ W. J. Talbott, "Two Principles of Bayesian Epistemology", Philosophical Studies 62(2), May 1991, pp. 135–150.
External links
- van Fraassen's homepage at Princeton.
- van Fraassen's faculty page (2009) at the Department of Philosophy, San Francisco State University.