On What Empiricism Cannot Be

Abstract

Bas C. van Fraassen, in his Terry Lectures at Yale University (subsequently published as The Empirical Stance), is concerned to elucidate what empiricism is, and could be, given past and current failures of characterization. He contends that naive empiricism—the metaphilosophical position that characterizes empiricism in terms of a thesis—is self-refuting, and he offers a reductio ad absurdum to substantiate this claim. Moreover, in place of naive empiricism, van Fraassen endorses stance empiricism: the metaphilosophical position that characterizes empiricism in terms of certain attitudes and commitments. The present article, however, argues that van Fraassen begs the question in his reductio of naive empiricism, and thus that his primary defense of stance empiricism is inadequate.