van Fraassen, Bas

"Truth about the unobservable may forever exceed our grasp."

"The history of science shows us repeatedly revising what we thought we knew."

"Constructive empiricism offers a middle path between naive realism and radical skepticism."

"Our theories carve nature at its joints, but only provisionally."

"The rational person believes only what the evidence warrants."

"Language shapes our understanding of reality in ways we rarely recognize."

"The quantum world challenges our everyday intuitions about observation and reality."

"Science is a conversation between the mind and the world, not a monologue."

"We should be skeptical of skeptics who claim total knowledge of human limitations."

"Understanding requires interpretation, and interpretation always involves some degree of judgment."

"The realist and the empiricist may disagree about metaphysics but agree on science."

"Theories fail not because they are false but because they become empirically inadequate."

"Humility before nature is the first virtue of the scientist."

"Our theories are maps, not the territory itself."

"Philosophy of science requires both respect for science and independence from it."

"The success of a theory is no guarantee of its truth."

"We accept what works, even if we cannot fully explain why it works."

"Knowledge is always situated, always from a particular perspective."

"The debate between realism and empiricism is not merely academic."

"Observable phenomena are the court of final appeal for scientific theories."

"Certainty is a luxury we can seldom afford in matters of factual knowledge."

"Every theory carries with it hidden assumptions about the nature of reality."

"Empiricism without dogmatism is philosophy's difficult balance."

"The scientist must be both creative and disciplined by evidence."

"What counts as an observation is itself a theoretical question."

"We build knowledge incrementally, layer upon layer, always provisionally."

"The universe under one description may be perfectly rational, under another apparently chaotic."

"Science progresses not by proving theories true but by showing them inadequate."

"The empiricist respects the world's resistance to our theories."

"Interpretation is not an alternative to understanding; it is its very substance."