The 2026 Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy goes to Bas van Fraassen

The 2026 winner of the Rolf Schock Prize, among the highest honours in logic and philosophy, has been announced: Bastiaan "Bas" van Fraassen, professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University.

The citation credits van Fraassen with "developing a compelling empiricist approach that moves decisively beyond logical empiricism, has profoundly influenced contemporary philosophy of science and has shaped the debate over scientific realism".

The prize is worth 600,000 Swedish kronor (about 66,000 US dollars).

What is constructive empiricism?#

Van Fraassen's The Scientific Image (1980) closed one period in the philosophy of science and opened another.

Until then the argument had been squeezed between two poles. Realists held that successful scientific theories are true and that unobservable entities such as electrons really exist. Logical empiricists held that statements about unobservables were meaningless or were shorthand.

Van Fraassen proposed a third way. Scientific theories, on his account, are meaningful — when we say electron we really do mean electron, we are not abbreviating. But to accept a theory is not to have to believe that it is true.

The aim of science, for van Fraassen, is not truth but empirical adequacy: it is enough that what the theory says about observable phenomena is true. On claims about unobservables, belief may be suspended.

That position came to be called constructive empiricism.