Being moved by a way the world is not

Ward E. Jones

pp. 131-141

in: Darrell P. Rowbottom, Otávio Bueno (eds), Stance and rationality, Synthese 178 (1), 2011.

Abstract

At the end of Lecture 3 of The Empirical Stance, Bas van Fraassen suggests that we see the change of view involved in scientific revolutions as being, at least in part, emotional. In this paper, I explore one plausible way of cashing out this suggestion. Someone’s emotional approval of a description of the world, I argue, thereby shows that she takes herself to have reason to take that description seriously. This is true even if she is convinced—as a scientific community is when it considers alternative theories—that this description is false, that it is not the way the world is.