Bas C. van Fraassen burst onto the scene in 1980 with his groundbreaking work, The Scientific Image. The dark cover of my well-worn edition has faded with use over the years. van Fraassen proposed in his book something called "constructive empiricism" in which - with a nod to Kuhn - science is based on the creation of models that aim to be "empirically adequate" but which are not (necessarily) literal representations of the world. In Scientific Realism, van Fraassen wrestles with the tensions inherent in this view regarding the 'theory' layer and the 'data' layer of a theory. The theory may fit the data, sure, but if the data were collected according to the needs of the theory, how does one respond to a challenge of the data? The result, says the reviewer, is an even more radical anti-realism than had characterized even van Fraassen's earlier works.
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