van Fraassen's Empirical Stance: a Dogmatic or Rationalistic Approach?

In his Empirical Stance, van Fraassen introduces a new version of empiricism and elaborates its relation with science and religion. van Fraassen's empirical stance, characterized by a negative attitude towards metaphysics, is to result in a coherent view alongside his new epistemology called voluntarism - a non-dogmatic approach to rationality. This paper aims to show that its coherency is unstable. Because traces of dogmatism still plague van Fraassen's account of empiricism, and attempts to eliminate them lead to critical rationalism, affecting his encounter with metaphysics. In the end, while stating some cases from the history of science, it will be emphasized that empiricism should not tie its identity with the opposition to metaphysics.