I reply to three commentators—Friederike Moltmann, Daniel Rothschild, and Zoltán Szabó—on six topics—sense and reference, the unity of subject matter, questions, presupposition, partial truth, and content mereology.

Popper's definition of verisimilitude was criticized for its paradoxical consequences in the case of false theories. The aim of this paper is to show that paradoxes disappear if the falsity content of a theory is defined with help of dCn or Cn –1.

The short answer to this question is a firm and unambiguous “yes and no”. The long answer will take the whole talk. Indeed, it could easily take an entire book. It is therefore unavoidable to take recourse here and there to simplifying shortcuts and polemical exaggerations, in order to get the message clear.

In recent decades, English has become the uncontestable lingua franca of philosophy of science and of most other areas of philosophy and of the humanities. To have a lingua franca produces enormous benefits for the entire scientific community. The price for those benefits, however, is paid almost exclusively by non-native speakers of English. Section 1 identifies three asymmetries that individual NoNES researchers encounter: ‘publication asymmetry’, ‘resources asymmetry’, and ‘team asymmetry’. Section 2 deals with ‘globalized parochialism asymmetry’: thanks to English being (...) a lingua franca, a special perspective, mostly US and British, is being globalized and is replacing European topics and approaches. This has serious consequences for history of philosophy as well as for philosophical theory: thinkers of the past tend to be dealt with on the global level at best only if and insofar they are translated into English. Similarly, the theoretical agenda of globalized philosophy of scien... (shrink)

Scientists often study hypotheses that they know to be false. This creates an interpretive problem for Bayesians because the probability assigned to a hypothesis is typically interpreted as the probability that the hypothesis is true. I argue that solving the interpretive problem requires coming up with a new semantics for Bayesian inference. I present and contrast two new semantic frameworks, and I argue that both of them support the claim that there is pervasive pragmatic encroachment on whether a given Bayesian (...) probability assignment is rational. (shrink)

Bayesianism and likelihoodism are two of the most important frameworks philosophers of science use to analyse scientific methodology. However, both frameworks face a serious objection: much scientific inquiry takes place in highly idealized frameworks where all the hypotheses are known to be false. Yet, both Bayesianism and likelihoodism seem to be based on the assumption that the goal of scientific inquiry is always truth rather than closeness to the truth. Here, I argue in favour of a verisimilitude framework for inductive (...) inference. In the verisimilitude framework, scientific inquiry is conceived of, in part, as a process where inference methods ought to be calibrated to appropriate measures of closeness to the truth. To illustrate the verisimilitude framework, I offer a reconstruction of parsimony evaluations of scientific theories, and I give a reconstruction and extended analysis of the use of parsimony inference in phylogenetics. By recasting phylogenetic inference in the verisimilitude framework, it becomes possible to both raise and address objections to phylogenetic methods that rely on parsimony. 1Introduction2Problems with the Law of Likelihood3Introducing Verisimilitude-Based Inference4Examples of Verisimilitude-Based Inference Procedures4.1Parsimony inference over theories4.2Parsimony inference in phylogenetics5Conclusion. (shrink)

Begins by explaining then proving a generalized language dependence result similar to Goodman's "grue" problem. I then use this result to cast doubt on the existence of an objective evidential favoring relation (such as "the evidence confirms one hypothesis over another," "the evidence provides more reason to believe one hypothesis over the other," "the evidence justifies one hypothesis over the other," etc.). Once we understand what language dependence tells us about evidential favoring, our options are an implausibly strong conception of (...) the a priori, a hard externalism on which agents are unable to determine what their evidence favors, or a subjectivist view that makes evidential favoring relative to features of the agent. (shrink)

In this paper we focus on two claims, put forward by Feyerabend in his later writings , which constitute the metaphysical core of his view of scientific inquiry. The first, that we call the pliability thesis, is the claim that the world can be described by indefinitely many conceptual systems, none of them enjoying a privileged status. The second, that we call the resistance thesis, is the claim that the pliability of the world is limited, i.e., not all the different (...) conceptual systems that can be used to describe the world will be equally successful: the world offers resistance to some attempts to describe it. We show that, in spite of the later Feyerabend’s notorious antirealist leanings, the pliability thesis is fully compatible with a robustly realist view of science, and we suggest that, surprisingly, Feyerabend’s insights concerning the limited pliability of the world turn out to be those of a potential ally of sophisticated versions of scientific realism. (shrink)

In this paper, three theories of progress and the aim of science are discussed: the theory of progress as increasing explanatory power, advocated by Popper in The logic of scientific discovery ; the theory of progress as approximation to the truth, introduced by Popper in Conjectures and refutations ; the theory of progress as a steady increase of competing alternatives, which Feyerabend put forward in the essay “Reply to criticism. Comments on Smart, Sellars and Putnam” and defended as late as (...) the last edition of Against method. It is argued that, contrary to what Feyerabend scholars have predominantly assumed, Feyerabend's changing attitude towards falsificationism—which he often advocated at the beginning of his career, and vociferously attacked in the 1970s and 1980s—must be explained by taking into account not only Feyerabend's very peculiar view of the aim of science, but also Popper's changing account of progress. (shrink)

Arguably, there is no substantial, general answer to the question of what makes for the approximate truth of theories. But in one class of cases, the issue seems simply resolved. A wide class of applied dynamical theories can be treated as two-component theories—one component specifying a certain kind of abstract geometrical structure, the other giving empirical application to this structure by claiming that it replicates, subject to arbitrary scaling for units etc., the geometric structure to be found in some real-world (...) dynamical phenomenon. In such a case, a theory is approximately true just if the one geometric structure approximately replicates the other (and if problems remain here, they are problems in geometry, of specifying suitable metric approximation relations, not conceptual problems). This article amplifies and defends this simple approach to approximate truth for dynamical theories. (shrink)

Zwart and Franssen’s impossibility theorem reveals a conflict between the possible-world-based content-definition and the possible-world-based likeness-definition of verisimilitude. In Sect. 2 we show that the possible-world-based content-definition violates four basic intuitions of Popper’s consequence-based content-account to verisimilitude, and therefore cannot be said to be in the spirit of Popper’s account, although this is the opinion of some prominent authors. In Sect. 3 we argue that in consequence-accounts , content-aspects and likeness-aspects of verisimilitude are not in conflict with each other, but (...) in agreement . We explain this fact by pointing towards the deep difference between possible-world- and the consequence-accounts, which does not lie in the difference between syntactic (object-language) versus semantic (meta-language) formulations, but in the difference between ‘disjunction-of-possible-worlds’ versus ‘conjunction-of-parts’ representations of theories. Drawing on earlier work, we explain in Sect. 4 how the shortcomings of Popper’s original definition can be repaired by what we call the relevant element approach. We propose a quantitative likeness-definition of verisimilitude based on relevant elements which provably agrees with the qualitative relevant content-definition of verisimilitude on all pairs of comparable theories. We conclude the paper with a plea for consequence-accounts and a brief analysis of the problem of language-dependence (Sect. 6). (shrink)

The expansion or revision of false theories by true evidence does not always increase their verisimilitude. After a comparison of different notions of verisimilitude the relation between verisimilitude and belief expansion or revision is investigated within the framework of the relevant element account. We are able to find certain interesting conditions under which both the expansion and the revision of theories by true evidence is guaranteed to increase their verisimilitude.

In “What price coherence?”, Klein and Warfield put forward a simple argument that triggered an extensive debate on the epistemic virtues of coherence. As is well-known, this debate yielded far-reaching impossibility results to the effect that coherence is not conducive to truth, even if construed in a ceteris paribus sense. A large part of the present paper is devoted to a re-evaluation of these results. As is argued, all explications of truth-conduciveness leave out an important aspect: while it might not (...) be the case that coherence is truth-conducive, it might be conducive to verisimilitude or epistemic utility. Unfortunately, it is shown that the answer for both these issues must be in the negative, again. Furthermore, we shift the focus from sets of beliefs to particular beliefs: as is shown, neither is any of the extant probabilistic measures of coherence truth-conducive on the level of particular beliefs, nor does weakening these measures to quasi-orderings establish the link between coherence and truth for an important amount of measures. All in all, the results in this paper cast a serious doubt on the approach of establishing a link between coherence and truth. Finally, recent arguments that shift the focus from the relationship between coherence and truth to the one between coherence and confirmation are assessed. (shrink)

This is a response to the papers in the special issue Logical Perspectives on Science and Cognition—The Philosophy of Gerhard Schurz.

The paper starts with the distinction between conjunction-of-parts accounts and disjunction-of-possibilities accounts to truthlikeness. In Sect. 3, three distinctions between kinds of truthlikeness measures are introduced: comparative versus numeric t-measures, t-measures for qualitative versus quantitative theories, and t-measures for deterministic versus probabilistic truth. These three kinds of truthlikeness are explicated and developed within a version of conjunctive part accounts based on content elements. The focus lies on measures of probabilistic truthlikeness, that are divided into t-measures for statistical probabilities and single (...) case probabilities. The logical notion of probabilistic truthlikeness can be treated as a subcase of deterministic truthlikeness for quantitative theories. In contrast, the epistemic notion of probabilistic truthlikeness creates genuinely new problems, especially for hypotheses about single case probabilities that are evaluated not by comparison to observed frequencies, but by comparison to the truth values of single event statements. By the method of meta-induction, competing theories about single case probabilities can be aggregated into a combined theory with optimal predictive success and epistemic truthlikeness. (shrink)

There are two ways of representing rational belief: qualitatively as yes-or-no belief, and quantitatively as degrees of belief. Standard rationality conditions are: consistency and logical closure, for qualitative belief, satisfaction of the probability axioms, for quantitative belief, and a relationship between qualitative and quantitative beliefs in accordance with the Lockean thesis. In this paper, it is shown that these conditions are inconsistent with each of three further rationality conditions: fallibilism, open-mindedness, and invariance under independent conceptual expansions. Restrictions of the Lockean (...) thesis that have been suggested in the literature cannot remove the inconsistency. In the outlook we discuss two alternative ways of dealing with this problem: restricting conjunctive closure or going for a dual system account. (shrink)

In this article, against the background of a notion of ‘assembled’ truth, the evolutionary progressiveness of a theory is suggested as novel and promising explanation for the success of science. A new version of realism in science, referred to as ‘naturalised realism’ is outlined. Naturalised realism is ‘fallibilist’ in the unique sense that it captures and mimics the self-corrective core of scientific knowledge and its progress. It is argued that naturalised realism disarms Kyle Stanford’s anti-realist ‘new induction’ threats by showing (...) that ‘explanationism’ and his ‘epistemic instrumentalism’ are just two positions among many on a constantly evolving continuum of options between instrumentalism and full-blown realism. In particular it is demonstrated that not only can naturalised realism redefine the terms of realist debate in such a way that no talk of miracles need enter the debate, but it also promises interesting defenses against inductive- and under-determination-based anti-realist arguments. (shrink)

The Verisimilitudinarian approach to scientific progress (VS, for short) is traditionally considered a realist-correspondist model to explain the proximity of our best scientific theories to the way things really are in the world out there (ʻthe Truthʻ, with the capital ʻtʻ). However, VS is based on notions, such as ʻestimated verisimilitudeʻ or ʻapproximate truthʻ, that dilute the model in a functionalist-like theory. My thesis, then, is that VS tries to incorporate notions, such as ʻprogressʻ, in a pre-constituted metaphysical conception of (...) the world, but fails in providing a fitting framework. The main argument that I will develop to support this claim is that the notions that they use to explain scientific progress (ʻestimated verisimilitudeʻ or ʻapproximate truthʻ) have nothing to do with ʻthe Truthʻ. After presenting Cevolani and Tamboloʻs answer (2013) to Birdʻs arguments (2007), I will claim that VS sacrifices the realist-correspondist truth in favor of an epistemic notion of truth, which can obviously be compatible with certain kinds of realism but not with the one the authors have in mind (the correspondence between our theories and the way things really are). (shrink)

After a brief presentation of the Verisimilitudinarian approach to scientific progress, I argue that the notion of estimated verisimilitude is too weak for the purposes of scientific realism. Despite the realist-correspondist intuition that inspires the model—the idea that our theories get closer and closer to ‘the real way the world is’—, Bayesian estimations of truthlikeness are not objective enough to sustain a realist position. The main argument of the paper is that, since estimated verisimilitude is not connected to actual verisimilitude, (...) the way the Verisimilitudinarian account works is not in the end different from other antirealist accounts. Finally, I briefly present Alexander Bird’s cumulative approach to scientific progress, and argue that it has a similar problem; Bird has in mind truth in the correspondence sense, but all the metaphysical weight is put on the notion of ‘approximate truth’—whose connection to ‘the real way the world is’ is not clear. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that qualitative theories (Q-theories) can be used to describe the statistical structure of cross classified populations and that the notion of verisimilitude provides an appropriate tool for measuring the statistical adequacy of Q-theories. First of all, a short outline of the post-Popperian approaches to verisimilitude and of the related verisimilitudinarian non-falsificationist methodologies (VNF-methodologies) is given. Secondly, the notion of Q-theory is explicated, and the qualitative verisimilitude of Q-theories is defined. Afterwards, appropriate measures for the (...) statistical verisimilitude of Q-theories are introduced, so to obtain a clear formulation of the intuitive idea that the statistical truth about cross classified populations can be approached by falsified Q-theories. Finally, it is argued that some basic intuitions underlying VNF-methodologies are shared by the so-called prediction logic, developed by the statisticians and social scientists David K. Hildebrand, James D. Laing and Howard Rosenthal. (shrink)

InScience and Values (1984) and other, more recent, works, e.g. (1987a, 1987b, 1989a, 1989b, 1990), Larry Laudan proposes a theory of scientific debate he dubs the reticulated model of scientific rationality (Laudan, 1984, pp. 50–66). The model stands in sharp contrast to hierarchical approaches to rationality exemplified by Popper (1959), Hempel (1965), and Reichenbach (1938), as well as the conventionalist views of rationality defended by Carnap (1950), Popper (1959), Kuhn (1962), and Lakatos (1978). Ironically, the model commits some of the (...) same errors Laudan finds in hierarchicalist and conventionalists approaches to scientific rationality. This paper will show that the model can be fixed by recognizing that criteria of goal assessment have no privileged status. These rules are best viewed as simply rules of rationality (or rules of scientific method) by another name. (shrink)

InExplaining Science: A Cognitive Approach, Ronald Giere (1988), proposes what he calls a cognitive theory of science (p. 2). Giere intends his view to be a broadly scientific account employing the resources of the cognitive sciences (Giere, 1988, p. 2). This paper argues that Giere does not secure a firm foundation for a cognitive theory of science because he leaves the door wide open for social constructivist interpretations of his views. In order to avoid social constructivism, Giere needs to adopt (...) or develop an objective (i.e. non-conventionalist) concept of similarity. (shrink)

In this rather technical paper we establish a useful combination of belief revision and verisimilitude according to which better theories provide better predictions, and revising with more verisimilar data results in theories that are closer to the truth. Moreover, this paper presents two alternative definitions of refined verisimilitude, which are more perspicuous than the algebraic version used in previous publications.

This article develops a new perspective on theism that makes the simple juxtaposition of theism and atheism problematic, and helps bridge philosophy of religion and the empirical study of religious phenomena. The basic idea is developed inspired by Terrence Deacon's book Incomplete Nature and its description of “ententional” phenomena, together with some ideas from the cognitive science of religion, especially those related to agency and “theological correctness.” It is argued that God should not be understood as a “homunculus” that stops (...) an otherwise infinite regress of arguments. (shrink)

The similarity approach stands as a significant attempt to defend scientific realism from the attack of the pessimistic meta-induction. The strategy behind the similarity approach is to shift from an absolute notion of truth to the more flexible one of truthlikeness. Nonetheless, some authors are not satisfied with this attempt to defend realism and find that the notion of truthlikeness is not fully convincing. The aim of this paper is to analyze and understand the reasons of this dissatisfaction. Our thesis (...) is that the dissatisfaction with the notion of truthlikeness concerns the double role that this notion plays within the similarity approach: This notion plays both a regulative role in the conception of theories and a constitutive one in their selection. (shrink)

It is argued that Arthur Fine's “natural ontological attitude” (NOA), i.e., the view that science should not be philosophically (either realistically or anti‐realistically) interpreted at all but should rather be allowed to “speak for itself”, is seriously problematic, even though it contains deep insights which philosophers of science should take into account. In particular, Fine succeeds in showing that no non‐question‐begging, conclusive demonstration of scientific realism (e.g., on “explanationist” grounds) is possible. But this is not a threat to scientific realism, (...) if realism is subordinated to pragmatism. From the pragmatic point of view, the demand for a non‐circular proof of scientific realism is mistaken. Rather, realism can be seen as our natural attitude, based on our practices, scientific and otherwise. Fine's NOA turns out to be, on a charitable reading, quite close to a version of pragmatic realism. The paper concludes by briefly examining the idea of regarding realism as a “narrative explanation” of science. (shrink)

The idea that sentences can be closer or further apart in meaning is highly intuitive. Not only that, it is also a pillar of logic, semantic theory and the philosophy of science, and follows from other commitments about similarity. The present paper proposes a novel way of comparing the ‘distance’ between two pairs of propositions. We define ‘\ is closer in meaning to \ than \ is to \’ and thereby give a precise account of comparative propositional similarity facts. Notably, (...) our definition eschews metric assumptions, which are unrealistic in most applications of interest. (shrink)

We can witness the recent surge of interest in the interaction between cognitive science, philosophy of science, and aesthetics on the problem of representation. This naturally leads us to rethinking the achievements of Goodman’s monumental book Languages of Art. For, there is no doubt that no one else contributed more than Goodman to throw a light on the cognitive function of art. Ironically, it could be also Goodman who has been the stumbling block for a unified theory of representation. In (...) this paper, I shall contrast the ways how differently misrepresentation has been treated in cognitive science, aesthetics, and philosophy of science. And I shall show that it is Goodman’s unnecessary separation of resemblance and representation in art that made such a difference. As a conclusion, I will indicate some of the most promising projects toward the unified theory of representation the revolt against Goodman’s rejection of resemblance theories might promise to us. (shrink)

A number of different theories of truthlikeness have been proposed, but most can be classified into one of two different main programmes: the probability-content programme and the likeness programme.1 In Brink and Heidema [1987] we are offered a further proposal, with the attraction of some novelty. I argue that while the heuristic path taken by the authors is rather remote from what they call ‘the well-worn paths’,2 in fact their point of arrival is rather closer to existing proposals within the (...) likeness approach than might at first appear. It is the purpose of this note to outline the logical connections and to assess the reasons which have been offered in favour of the new proposal. (shrink)

Two different programmes are in the business of explicating accuracy—the truthlikeness programme and the epistemic utility programme. Both assume that truth is the goal of inquiry, and that among inquiries that fall short of realizing the goal some get closer to it than others. Truthlikeness theorists have been searching for an account of the accuracy of propositions. Epistemic utility theorists have been searching for an account of the accuracy of credal states. Both assume we can make cognitive progress in an (...) inquiry even while falling short of the target. I show that the prospects for combining these two programmes are bleak. A core accuracy principle, proximity, that is universally embraced within the truthlikeness programme turns out to be incompatible with a central principle within the epistemic utility programme, namely propriety. 1Truthlikeness and Epistemic Utility 2Inquiries 3Accuracy for Propositions 4Proximity 5Accuracy for Credal States 6Propriety 7Proximity for Credal States 8Extensionality 9Admissible Weightings 10Propriety Violates Proximity 11Possible Responses 11.1Retreat to convexity 11.2Reject boundedness 11.3Reject additivity 12The Upshot. (shrink)

I present a new definition of verisimilitude, framed in terms of causes. Roughly speaking, according to it a scientific model is approximately true if it captures accurately the strengths of the causes present in any given situation. Against much of the literature, I argue that any satisfactory account of verisimilitude must inevitably restrict its judgments to context-specific models rather than general theories. We may still endorse—and only need—a relativized notion of scientific progress, understood now not as global advance but rather (...) as the mastering of particular problems. This also sheds new light on longstanding difficulties surrounding language-dependence and models committed to false ontologies. (shrink)

According to the traditional requirement, formulated by William Whewell in his account of the “consilience of inductions” in 1840, a scientific hypothesis should have unifying power in the sense that it explains and predicts several mutually independent phenomena. Variants of this notion of consilience or unification include deductive, inductive, and approximate systematization. Inference from surprising phenomena to their theoretical explanations was called abduction by Charles Peirce. As a unifying theory is independently testable by new kinds of phenomena, it should also (...) receive confirmation from its empirical success. The study of the prospects of probabilistic Bayesianism to motivate this kind of criterion for abductive confirmation is shown to lead to two quite distinct conceptions of unification. (shrink)

Woosuk Park’s paper “Misrepresentation in Context” is a useful plea for a theory of representation with promising interaction between cognitive science, philosophy of science, and aesthetics. In this paper, I argue that such a unified account is provided by Charles S. Peirce’s semiotics. This theory puts Park’s criticism of Nelson Goodman and Jerry Fodor in context. Some of Park’s pertinent remarks on the problem of misrepresentation can be illuminated by the account of truthlikeness and idealization developed by philosophers of science.

Belief revision (BR) and truthlikeness (TL) emerged independently as two research programmes in formal methodology in the 1970s. A natural way of connecting BR and TL is to ask under what conditions the revision of a belief system by new input information leads the system towards the truth. It turns out that, for the AGM model of belief revision, the only safe case is the expansion of true beliefs by true input, but this is not very interesting or realistic as (...) a model of theory change in science. The new accounts of non-prioritized belief revision do not seem more promising in this respect, and the alternative BR account of updating by imaging leads to other problems. Still, positive results about increasing truthlikeness by belief revision may be sought by restricting attention to special kinds of theories. Another approach is to link truthlikeness to epistemic matters by an estimation function which calculates expected degrees of truthlikeness relative to evidence. Then we can study how the expected truthlikeness of a theory changes when probabilities are revised by conditionalization or imaging. Again, we can ask under what conditions such changes lead our best theories towards the truth. (shrink)

From its inception in 1987 social epistemology has been divided into analytic and critical approaches, represented by Alvin I. Goldman and Steve Fuller, respectively. In this paper, the agendas and some basic ideas of ASE and CSE are compared and assessed by bringing into the discussion also other participants of the debates on the social aspects of scientific knowledge—among them Raimo Tuomela, Philip Kitcher and Helen Longino. The six topics to be analyzed include individual and collective epistemic agents; the notion (...) of scientific community; realism and constructivism; truth-seeking communities; epistemic and social values; science, experts, and democracy. (shrink)

The notion of truthlikeness or verisimilitude has been a topic of intensive discussion ever since the definition proposed by Karl Popper was refuted in 1974. This paper gives an analysis of old and new debates about this notion. There is a fairly large agreement about the truthlikeness ordering of conjunctive theories, but the main rival approaches differ especially about false disjunctive theories. Continuing the debate between Niiniluoto’s min-sum measure and Schurz’s relevant consequence measure, the paper also gives a critical assessment (...) of Oddie’s new defense of the average measure and Kuipers’ refined definition of truth approximation. (shrink)

The distinction between basic and applied research is notoriously vague, despite its frequent use in science studies and in science policy. In most cases it is based on such pragmatic factors as the knowledge and intentions of the investigator or the type of research institute. Sometimes the validity of the distinction is denied altogether. This paper suggests that there are two ways of distinguishing systematically between basic and applied research: (i) in terms of the utilities that define the aims of (...) inquiry, and (ii) by reference to the structure of the relevant knowledge claims. An important type of applied research aims at results that are expressed by techical norms (in von Wright's sense): if you wish to achieveA, and you believe you are in a situationB, then you should doX. This conception of design sciences allows us to re-evaluate many issues in the history, philosophy, and ethics of science. (shrink)

The notion of truthlikeness or verisimilitude has been a topic of intensive discussion ever since the definition proposed by Karl Popper was refuted in 1974. This paper gives an analysis of old and new debates about this notion. There is a fairly large agreement about the truthlikeness ordering of conjunctive theories, but the main rival approaches differ especially about false disjunctive theories. Continuing the debate between Niiniluoto’s min-sum measure and Schurz’s relevant consequence measure, the paper also gives a critical assessment (...) of Oddie’s new defense of the average measure and Kuipers’ refined definition of truth approximation. (shrink)

One of the many research projects of Jaakko Hintikka was entitled “Logical tools for human thinking and their history”. This is in fact an apt summary of the lifetime work of this master logician who developed several new methods and systems in mathematical and philosophical logic, among them distributive normal forms, model sets, possible-worlds semantics, epistemic logic, doxastic logic, inductive logic, semantic information, game-theoretical semantics, interrogative approach to inquiry, and independence-friendly logic. He applied them to study problems in philosophy of (...) language, formal epistemology, and philosophy of science. He combined systematic work with novel interpretations of important historical figures like Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, Peirce, and Wittgenstein. Hintikka was one of the most cited analytic philosophers, and he influenced logic and philosophy also as a successful teacher and the long-time editor of the journal Synthese. (shrink)

Scientific realists use the “no miracle argument” to show that the empirical and pragmatic success of science is an indicator of the ability of scientific theories to give true or truthlike representations of unobservable reality. While antirealists define scientific progress in terms of empirical success or practical problem-solving, realists characterize progress by using some truth-related criteria. This paper defends the definition of scientific progress as increasing truthlikeness or verisimilitude. Antirealists have tried to rebut realism with the “pessimistic metainduction”, but critical (...) realists turn this argument into an optimistic view about progressive science. (shrink)

In the general problem of verisimilitude, we try to define the distance of a statement from a target, which is an informative truth about some domain of investigation. For example, the target can be a state description, a structure description, or a constituent of a first-order language. In the problem of legisimilitude, the target is a deterministic or universal law, which can be expressed by a nomic constituent or a quantitative function involving the operators of physical necessity and possibility. The (...) special case of legisimilitude, where the target is a probabilistic law, has been discussed by Roger Rosenkrantz and Ilkka Niiniluoto. Their basic proposal is to measure the distance between two probabilistic laws by the Kullback–Leibler notion of divergence, which is a semimetric on the space of probability measures. This idea can be applied to probabilistic laws of coexistence and laws of succession, and the examples may involve discrete or continuous state spaces. In this paper, these earlier studies are elaborated in four directions. First, even though deterministic laws are limiting cases of probabilistic laws, the target-sensitivity of truthlikeness measures implies that the legisimilitude of probabilistic laws is not easily reducible to the deterministic case. Secondly, the Jensen-Shannon divergence is applied to mixed probabilistic laws which entail some universal laws. Thirdly, a new class of distance measures between probability distributions is proposed, so that their horizontal differences are taken into account in addition to vertical ones. Fourthly, a solution is given for the epistemic problem of estimating degrees of probabilistic legisimilitude on the basis of empirical evidence. (shrink)

After Karl Popper’s original work, several approaches were developed to provide a sound explication of the notion of verisimilitude. With few exceptions, these contributions have assumed that the truth to be approximated is deterministic. This collection of ten papers addresses the more general problem of approaching probabilistic truths. They include attempts to find appropriate measures for the closeness to probabilistic truth and to evaluate claims about such distances on the basis of empirical evidence. The papers employ multiple analytical approaches, and (...) connect the research to related issues in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

The paper deals with the philosophy of science and technology from a new perspective. The analysis connects closely to the novel approach to scientific research called practical realism of the late Estonian philosopher of science and chemistry Rein Vihalemm. From his perspective, science is not only theoretical but even more clearly a practical activity. This kind of practice-based approach puts chemistry rather than physics into the position of the most typical science as chemistry has a dual character resting on both (...) constructive-hypothetico-deductive and classifying-historico-descriptive types of cognition. Chemists deal with finding out the laws of nature just like the physicists do. However, in addition to this chemistry deals with substances or stuff that is rather an activity typical to natural history. The analysis of the dual character of chemistry brings forward the need to analyse philosophically also the reasons why physics has held the position of the model science so far. The problem unfolds in the context of practical realism. However, some earlier observations concerning the dual character of chemistry influenced us as well, i.e. by Friedrich Paneth, Michael Polanyi and Edward Caldin. More recently, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Jonathan Simon have given their own explanation of why and how chemistry has a dual character. From their perspective, chemistry is a perfect technical science as it aims at applications, literally at producing something new. Bensaude-Vincent and Simon call their approach operational realism. The latter, however, does not differ from practical realism. (shrink)

Alexander Bird argues for an epistemic account of scientific progress, whereas Darrell Rowbottom argues for a semantic account. Both appeal to intuitions about hypothetical cases in support of their accounts. Since the methodological significance of such appeals to intuition is unclear, I think that a new approach might be fruitful at this stage in the debate. So I propose to abandon appeals to intuition and look at scientific practice instead. I discuss two cases that illustrate the way in which scientists (...) make judgments about progress. As far as scientists are concerned, progress is made when scientific discoveries contribute to the increase of scientific knowledge of the following sorts: empirical, theoretical, practical, and methodological. I then propose to articulate an account of progress that does justice to this broad conception of progress employed by scientists. I discuss one way of doing so, namely, by expanding our notion of scientific knowledge to include both know-that and know-how. (shrink)

Alexander Bird and Darrell Rowbottom have argued for two competing accounts of the concept of scientific progress. For Bird, progress consists in the accumulation of scientific knowledge. For Rowbottom, progress consists in the accumulation of true scientific beliefs. Both appeal to intuitions elicited by thought experiments in support of their views, and it seems fair to say that the debate has reached an impasse. In an attempt to avoid this stalemate, we conduct a systematic study of the factors that underlie (...) judgments about scientific progress. Our results suggest that (internal) justification plays an important role in intuitive judgments about progress, questioning the intuitive support for the claim that the concept of scientific progress is best explained in terms of the accumulation of only true scientific belief. (shrink)

In this article, through a critical examination of K. Brad Wray's version of the argument from underconsideration against scientific realism, I articulate a modest version of scientific realism. This modest realist position, which I call ‘relative realism’, preserves the scientific realist's optimism about science's ability to get closer to the truth while, at the same time, taking on board the antirealist's premise that theory evaluation is comparative, and thus that there are no good reasons to think that science's best theories (...) are close to the truth. (shrink)