Ideas
A philosopher of science, van Fraassen's 1989 book Laws and Symmetry attempted to lay the ground-work for explaining physical phenomena without assuming that such phenomena are caused by rules or laws which can be said to cause or govern their behavior. Focusing on the problem of underdetermination, he argued for the possibility that theories could have empirical equivalence but differ in their ontological commitments. He rejects the notion that the aim of science is to produce an account of the physical world that is literally true, but rather that its aim is to produce theories that are empirically adequate. Van Fraassen has also studied the philosophy of quantum mechanics, philosophical logic, and epistemology.
In his essay "The Anti-Realist Epistemology of Bas van Fraassen's The Scientific Image ", Paul M. Churchland, one of van Fraassen's critics, contrasted van Fraassen's idea of unobservable phenomena with the idea of merely unobserved phenomena.
In 1986, van Fraassen received the Lakatos Award for his contributions to the philosophy of science. He is an adult convert to the Roman Catholic Church and is one of the founders of the Kira Institute.
van Fraassen has been the editor of the Journal of Philosophical Logic and co-editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic.
Among his many students are the philosophers Elisabeth Lloyd at Indiana University and Anja Jauernig at the University of Pittsburgh.
In his paper Singular Terms, Truth-value Gaps, and Free Logic, van Fraassen opens with a very brief introduction of the problem of non-referring names. He indicates that 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 many-valued logics, and van Fraassen states that he would not argue against such a thing. However, he thinks that free logic is more apt and convenient to explain the natural language.
Instead of any unique formalization, though, he simply adjusts the axioms of a standard predicate logic such as that found in Quine's Methods of Logic. Instead of an axiom like he uses . Thus, if a name fails to refer, then it will be assigned a truth value here—which, naturally, will be true, because the existential claim of the antecedent is false.
He then shows that such a free logic is complete, but if one uses the free logic to accommodate supervaluationism then it is not.
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