ABSTRACT
The rapid and remarkable expansion of scientific realism in the 1970s sounded the death knell for logical positivism or logical empiricism. While it might be an exaggeration to say that the former had by the end of the 1970s replaced the latter as the dominant philosophy of science, there was little doubt that realism was quickly emerging as the victorious successor for that title. There was an impressive consensus that logical positivism was utterly untenable and had wrought widespread disaster in philosophy of science. In the rush to distance themselves from any contamination by the corpse of this corruptive influence, philosophers of science, of various shades and colour, sought haven in the clearly uncontaminated realm of scientific realism. In the 1980s, however, constructive empiricism, as articulated by van Fraassen, attempted to halt this onrush into scientific realism by arguing that the timely death knell of logical positivism was not ringing for the basic empiricist view that scientific knowledge is limited to what is observable. Empiricism, in the form of constructive empiricism, survives the totally legitimate demise of logical positivism.
