Expanding the Empirical Realm: No Threat to Constructive Empiricism

In his recent “Expanding the Empirical Realm: Constructive Empiricism and Augmented Observation” (2024), Finnur Dellsén recalls a quite famous case that Gideon Rosen put forward against manifestationalism thirty years ago, and maintains that an analogous argument might be presented against Bas van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism. This study is meant as a response to Dellsén: while the idea behind his paper is sound, I do not think it actually works. In brief, the reason is that we do not have God’s point of view and thus are in no condition to know whether a certain scientific theory is empirically adequate, let alone true. Once again, perhaps constructive empiricism still represents the best compromise so far presented between strict empiricism and the acknowledgment of the rationality of science.