Wilfred Sellars appears in Bas C. van Fraassen’s The Scientific Image as one of van Fraassen’s primary realist opponents. However, little attention has been paid to Sellars’s influence on van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism and van Fraassen’s criticisms of Sellarsian realism, despite the significant impact of The Scientific Image on the realism debate and recent renewed interest in Sellars’s scientific realism. In the first half of this article, I argue that reading The Scientific Image against a Sellarsian background helps clarify and (...) justify van Fraassen’s controversial characterization of scientific realism. Sellars and van Fraassen each inhabit a recognizable position in the other’s description of the realism debate and can reciprocally recognize the other as inhabiting the opposing position. The second half of this article reconstructs van Fraassen’s objections to Sellarsian realism in The Scientific Image and its precursors. I argue that van Fraassen’s criticisms of Sellarsian realism significantly developed between his 1975 paper, “Wilfrid Sellars on Scientific Realism” and his 1980 book. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I examine a view called ‘Epistemic Structural Realism’, which holds that we can, at best, have knowledge of the structure of the physical world. Put crudely, we can know physical objects only to the extent that they are nodes in a structure. In the spirit of Occam’s razor, I argue that, given certain minimal assumptions, epistemic structural realism provides a viable and reasonable scientific realist position that is less vulnerable to anti-realist arguments than any of its rivals.