Somewhere over the... what?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4013/fsu.2016.173.08Resumo
In order to defend his controversial claim that observation is unaided perception, Bas van Fraassen, the originator of constructive empiricism, suggested that, for all we know, the images produced by a microscope could be in a situation analogous to that of the rainbows, which are ‘images of nothing’. He added that reflections in the water, rainbows, and the like are ‘public hallucinations’, but it is not clear whether this constitutes an ontological category apart or an empty set. In this paper an argument will be put forward to the effect that rainbows can be thought of as events, that is, as part of a subcategory of entities that van Fraassen has always considered legitimate phenomena. I argue that rainbows are actually not images in the relevant (representational) sense and that there is no need to ontologically inflate the category of entities in order to account for them, which would run counter to the empiricist principle of parsimony.
Keywords: constructive empiricism, observability, observation, public hallucination, rainbow, van Fraassen.
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Concedo a revista Filosofia Unisinos – Unisinos Journal of Philosophy o direito de primeira publicação da versão revisada do meu artigo, licenciado sob a Licença Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (que permite o compartilhamento do trabalho com reconhecimento da autoria e publicação inicial nesta revista).
Afirmo ainda que meu artigo não está sendo submetido a outra publicação e não foi publicado na íntegra em outro periódico e assumo total responsabilidade por sua originalidade, podendo incidir sobre mim eventuais encargos decorrentes de reivindicação, por parte de terceiros, em relação à autoria do mesmo.
