Empirical Stance

Bas van Fraassen introduced the idea of a philosophical ‘stance’ as a solution to what he took to be a self-refutation worry for empiricism. According to the empiricist’s own position, all factual beliefs are contingent and a posteriori. It follows that if empiricism is a factual belief, it must itself be contingent and a posteriori, and thus, by the empiricist’s own lights, it may turn out to be false. But since this conclusion was reached by presupposing the truth of empiricism, empiricism threatens to be self-undermining, if construed as a factual belief. For the empiricist, empiricism seemingly must be both unquestioned presupposition, and vulnerable empirical hypothesis, which is an untenable situation. The solution, van Fraassen argued, is to construe empiricism as a ‘stance’: roughly, a cluster of attitudes, values, goals, and commitments. He then extended this to other philosophical positions, including materialism and naturalism. Stances are not true or false, like propositions, and are not believed or disbelieved. They are adopted, like an approach or policy, and are heavily value-laden.

Van Fraassen first developed the idea of empiricism as a stance in detail in Van Fraassen 2002. Teller 2004 and Chakravartty 2004 argued that stances should be understood as epistemic policies, or strategies for generating factual beliefs. Boucher 2014 argued that stances should be construed rather as perspectives or ways of seeing facts. Ladyman 2011 suggested that the empiricist and materialist stances, which van Fraassen thinks of as rivals, can be reconciled in the ‘scientistic stance’.