BOOK REVIEW Constructive empiricism revisited Paul Dicken: Constructive empiricism: Epistemology and the philosophy of science. London: Palgrave-McMillan, 2011, 288pp, $85.00 HB Marc Alspector-Kelly Published online: 4 August 2011 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 Constructive Empiricism (CE) quickly became famous for its immunity from the most devastating criticisms that brought down the logical empiricist view of science. But at least early on, CE was widely assumed to have inherited essentially the same epistemological grounding: empiricism teaches us that there are limits imposed by experience, and so our conception of science had better respect those limits or undermine the widely held assumption that scientific inquiry is rational. But in the thirty-odd years since he introduced CE, it has become increasingly apparent that Bas van Fraassen’s conception of CE’s epistemological backdrop represents at least as much departure from the past as does CE itself. In particular, CE is formulated and defended from within a ‘voluntarist’ epistemology, according to which the only constraints on rational opinion are logical and probabilistic consistency, beyond which remarkably meagre limits anything is permitted. It is very much to his credit that in his book Constructive Empiricism: Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science, Paul Dicken emphasizes the role that voluntarism plays in van Fraassen’s views. It is also to his credit that he recognizes that one could endorse CE while rejecting voluntarism and takes steps to characterize an alternative CE view along such alternative lines. The first three chapters of Dicken’s book directly address the relationship between voluntarism and CE. In the first chapter, Dicken surveys some of the standard criticisms of CE concerning the epistemological value of the observable/ unobservable distinction. While he is unimpressed by those arguments on their own merits, Dicken is primarily concerned to emphasize that voluntarism undermines their relevance: if anything goes beyond logical and probabilistic consistency, then no argument can be made out from the distinction’s being arbitrary to our being obliged to manage opinion in the same way on both sides. The second chapter M. Alspector-Kelly (&) Department of Philosophy, Western Michigan University, 3002 Moore Hall, 1903 West Michigan Avenue, Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5328, USA e-mail: malspect@wmich.edu 123 Metascience (2012) 21:187–191 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9574-9