bas van fraassen is nearly solely responsible for the initial development of constructive empiricism; its historically most important presentation appears in his "the scientific image" (1980). constructive empiricism states that scientific theories are semantically literal, that they aim to be empirically adequate, and that their acceptance involves, as belief, only that they are empirically adequate. a theory is empirically adequate if and only if everything that it says about observable entities is true (regardless of what it says about unobservable entities). a theory is semantically literal if and only if the language of the theory is interpreted in such a way that the claims of the theory are either true or false (as opposed to an instrumentalist reading).