Disciplinary Legal Empiricism

Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology

Empiricists are in general rather suspicious with respect to any kind of abstract entities like properties, classes, relations, numbers, propositions, etc. They usually feel much more in sympathy with nominalists than with realists (in the medieval sense). As far as possible they try to avoid any reference to abstract entities and to restrict themselves to what is sometimes called a nominalisti...

Some Realism About Empiricism

Intentionality Versus Constructive Empiricism

By focussing on the intentional character of observation in science, we argue that Constructive Empiricism—B.C. van Fraassen’s much debated and explored view of science—is inconsistent. We then argue there are at least two ways out of our Inconsistency Argument, one of which is more easily to square with Constructive Empiricism than the other. 1 The Inconsistency Argument We shall argue that th...

The Poverty of Empiricism

Many researchers – and their advisors on research method – adopt a doctrine called empiricism, which claims that researchers may only use empirical methods. This restrictive doctrine impoverishes any academic discipline where it is dominant. The main reason is that a discipline only qualifies for the status of a science after it has progressed beyond empirical generalisations to explanatory the...

Structural Empiricism, Again1

As is well known, there are two crucial arguments in the realism debate. According to the no-miracles argument, it would be a miracle if our best scientific theories – namely, those which successfully predict novel phenomena – were not true (or approximately true). So, we should take theories that yield novel predictions as being true or, at least, approximately so. Clearly, considerations of t...