Empiricism won’t devolve into skepticism and doesn’t force epistemic attitudes towards observations

In this version of empiricism, empiricism is insulated from scepticism by setting its focus on the manner in which we update our beliefs, and not on their initial formation. According to van Fraassen, “It is possible to remain an empiricist without sliding into scepticism, exactly by rejecting the sceptics’ pious demands for justification where none is to be had.” (1989, 178) Once we are committed to the general framework of observable phenomena we will be in a position critically to examine the ways in which we change our beliefs, but there is no useful prospect of a critical examination of our initial commitments. Critics of empiricism can wonder whether this pessimism about the scope of epistemology is justified, and whether van Fraassen is right to characterize of our initial position as involving no commitments other than commitments to observables. It has also been suggested that what is in dispute between empiricism and realism may not be decidable on the basis of considerations acceptable to both sides, and this has generated some scepticism about the legitimacy of this conflict. Penultimate draft of article published in The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, Sarkar and Pfeifer, eds. (Routledge, 2006), 235-243. 19 5. Scepticism about empiricism Both the empiricist and the realist are committed to the project of giving a philosophical analysis of the aim of science; Arthur Fine argues that there is something wrong with that project. According to Fine, realists and empiricists are mistaken in supposing that science has a single essence amenable to philosophical examination. There is nothing in scientific practice itself, Fine argues, that requires our possession of a philosophical theory of the point of science, and nothing in the deliverances of scientific enquiry yields an answer to whether empiricism or realism is correct. As an alternative, Fine advocates what he calls the natural ontological attitude, according to which we allow science to ‘speak for itself’, and refrain from attempting to construct a notion of truth that goes beyond that ‘already in use in science.’ Of course both realists and empiricists take themselves to be articulating exactly that conception of truth that is already in use in science; Fine’s contention is that they do not have any neutral or unprejudiced perspective from which to pass judgment on what science involves. One of Fine’s central criticisms of empiricism is that the empiricist’s effort to create a special epistemic status for our claims about observables could only be based on a priori commitments that do not square well with the basic orientation of empiricism. Our observations alone do not force upon us any particular epistemic attitude to observation. If Fine is right about that, then the empiricist has some reason to resist the naturalist suggestion that the claims we advance in epistemology are, like the claims of empirical science, themselves warranted only by experience. (See van Fraassen 1995 for an argument along these lines.) Empiricism is then a theory about what claims are warranted within science; the separate question of what claims are warranted within epistemology would lie beyond the scope of empiricism itself.