Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. What is (Dis)Agreement?Darrell Patrick Rowbottom - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 97 (1):223-236.
    When do we agree? The answer might once have seemed simple and obvious; we agree that p when we each believe that p. But from a formal epistemological perspective, where degrees of belief are more fundamental than beliefs, this answer is unsatisfactory. On the one hand, there is reason to suppose that it is false; degrees of belief about p might differ when beliefs simpliciter on p do not. On the other hand, even if it is true, it is too (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • A pragmatic, existentialist approach to the scientific realism debate.Curtis Forbes - 2017 - Synthese 194 (9):3327-3346.
    It has become apparent that the debate between scientific realists and constructive empiricists has come to a stalemate. Neither view can reasonably claim to be the most rational philosophy of science, exclusively capable of making sense of all scientific activities. On one prominent analysis of the situation, whether we accept a realist or an anti-realist account of science actually seems to depend on which values we antecedently accept, rather than our commitment to “rationality” per se. Accordingly, several philosophers have attempted (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Approximate Truth and Descriptive Nesting.Jeffrey Alan Barrett - 2008 - Erkenntnis 68 (2):213-224.
    There is good reason to suppose that our best physical theories, quantum mechanics and special relativity, are false if taken together and literally. If they are in fact false, then how should they count as providing knowledge of the physical world? One might imagine that, while strictly false, our best physical theories are nevertheless in some sense probably approximately true. This paper presents a notion of local probable approximate truth in terms of descriptive nesting relations between current and subsequent theories. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  • Robustness, Diversity of Evidence, and Probabilistic Independence.Jonah N. Schupbach - 2015 - In Uskali Mäki, Stéphanie Ruphy, Gerhard Schurz & Ioannis Votsis (eds.), Recent Developments in the Philosophy of Science. Cham: Springer. pp. 305-316.
    In robustness analysis, hypotheses are supported to the extent that a result proves robust, and a result is robust to the extent that we detect it in diverse ways. But what precise sense of diversity is at work here? In this paper, I show that the formal explications of evidential diversity most often appealed to in work on robustness – which all draw in one way or another on probabilistic independence – fail to shed light on the notion of diversity (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • A Tale of Three Theories: Feyerabend and Popper on Progress and the Aim of Science.Luca Tambolo - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 51:33-41.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • The Problem of Unconceived Objections.Moti Mizrahi - 2014 - Argumentation 28 (4):425-436.
    In this paper, I argue that, just as the problem of unconceived alternatives provides a basis for a New Induction on the History of Science to the effect that a realist view of science is unwarranted, the problem of unconceived objections provides a basis for a New Induction on the History of Philosophy to the effect that a realist view of philosophy is unwarranted. I raise this problem not only for skepticism’s sake but also for the sake of making a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Assessing Theories: The Coherentist Approach.Peter Brössel - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (3):593-623.
    In this paper we show that the coherence measures of Olsson (J Philos 94:246–272, 2002), Shogenji (Log Anal 59:338–345, 1999), and Fitelson (Log Anal 63:194–199, 2003) satisfy the two most important adequacy requirements for the purpose of assessing theories. Following Hempel (Synthese 12:439–469, 1960), Levi (Gambling with truth, New York, A. A. Knopf, 1967), and recently Huber (Synthese 161:89–118, 2008) we require, as minimal or necessary conditions, that adequate assessment functions favor true theories over false theories and true and informative (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • What is Scientific Progress? Lessons from Scientific Practice.Moti Mizrahi - 2013 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 44 (2):375-390.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   21 citations  
  • The Argument from Underconsideration and Relative Realism.Moti Mizrahi - 2013 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 27 (4):393-407.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   23 citations  
  • Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Aim-Oriented Empiricism.Nicholas Maxwell - 2005 - Philosophia 32 (1-4):181-239.
    In this paper I argue that aim-oriented empiricism (AOE), a conception of natural science that I have defended at some length elsewhere[1], is a kind of synthesis of the views of Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos, but is also an improvement over the views of all three. Whereas Popper's falsificationism protects metaphysical assumptions implicitly made by science from criticism, AOE exposes all such assumptions to sustained criticism, and furthermore focuses criticism on those assumptions most likely to need revision if science is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Karl Popper, Science and Enlightenment.Nicholas Maxwell - 2017 - London: UCL Press.
    Karl Popper is famous for having proposed that science advances by a process of conjecture and refutation. He is also famous for defending the open society against what he saw as its arch enemies – Plato and Marx. Popper’s contributions to thought are of profound importance, but they are not the last word on the subject. They need to be improved. My concern in this book is to spell out what is of greatest importance in Popper’s work, what its failings (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Is It True What They Say about Tarski?Susan Haack - 1976 - Philosophy 51 (197):323 - 336.
    Popper welcomes Tarski's theory of truth as a vindication of the ‘objective or absolute or correspondence theory of truth’: -/- Tarski's greatest achievement, and the real significance of his theory for the philosophy of the empirical sciences, is that he rehabilitated the correspondence theory of absolute or objective truth … He vindicated the free use of the intuitive idea of truth as correspondence to the facts ….
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Evolutionary Epistemology and the Aim of Science.Darrell Patrick Rowbottom - 2010 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (2):209-225.
    Both Popper and van Fraassen have used evolutionary analogies to defend their views on the aim of science, although these are diametrically opposed. By employing Price's equation in an illustrative capacity, this paper considers which view is better supported. It shows that even if our observations and experimental results are reliable, an evolutionary analogy fails to demonstrate why conjecture and refutation should result in: (1) the isolation of true theories; (2) successive generations of theories of increasing truth-likeness; (3) empirically adequate (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • The P–T Probability Framework for Semantic Communication, Falsification, Confirmation, and Bayesian Reasoning.Chenguang Lu - 2020 - Philosophies 5 (4):25.
    Many researchers want to unify probability and logic by defining logical probability or probabilistic logic reasonably. This paper tries to unify statistics and logic so that we can use both statistical probability and logical probability at the same time. For this purpose, this paper proposes the P–T probability framework, which is assembled with Shannon’s statistical probability framework for communication, Kolmogorov’s probability axioms for logical probability, and Zadeh’s membership functions used as truth functions. Two kinds of probabilities are connected by an (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • From knowledge to wisdom: a revolution in the aims and methods of science.Nicholas Maxwell - 1984 - Oxford: Blackwell.
    This book argues for the need to put into practice a profound and comprehensive intellectual revolution, affecting to a greater or lesser extent all branches of scientific and technological research, scholarship and education. This intellectual revolution differs, however, from the now familiar kind of scientific revolution described by Kuhn. It does not primarily involve a radical change in what we take to be knowledge about some aspect of the world, a change of paradigm. Rather it involves a radical change in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   45 citations  
  • Karl Popper.Stephen Thornton - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • Karl Raimund Popper.Nicholas Maxwell - 1978 - In Philip Breed Dematteis, Peter S. Fosl & Leemon B. McHenry (eds.), British Philosophers, 1800-2000. Bruccoli Clark Layman. pp. 176-194.
    Karl Popper is the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. No other philosopher of the period has produced a body of work that is as significant. What is best in Popper's output is contained in his first four published books. These tackle fundamental problems with ferocious, exemplary integrity, clarity, simplicity and originality. They have widespread, fruitful implications, for science, for philosophy, for the social sciences, for education, for art, for politics and political philosophy. This article provides a critical survey of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Scientific Realism.Richard Boyd - 1984 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 21 (1&2):767-791.
    (i) Scientific realism is primarily a metaphysical doctrine about the existence and nature of the unobservables of science. (ii) There are good explanationist arguments for realism, most famously that from the success of science, provided abduction is allowed. Abduction seems to be on an equal footing, at least, with other ampliative methods of inference. (iii) We have no reason to believe a doctrine of empirical equivalence that would sustain the underdetermination argument against realism. (iv) The key to defending realism from (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   102 citations  
  • A note on verisimilitude and relativization to problems.Philippe Mongin - 1990 - Erkenntnis 33 (3):391-396.
    This note aims at critically assessing a little-noticed proposal made by Popper in the second edition of "Objective Knowledge" to the effect that verisimilitude of scientific theories should be made relative to the problems they deal with. Using a simple propositional calculus formalism, it is shown that the "relativized" definition fails for the very same reason why Popper's original concept of verisimilitude collapsed -- only if one of two theories is true can they be compared in terms of the suggested (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Progress: Metaphysical and otherwise.Robert Wachbroit - 1986 - Philosophy of Science 53 (3):354-371.
    Realism about progress--that progress consists in the obtaining of some metaphysical relation between a sequence of theories and the world--is often thought to be required by realism about the representational character of theories. The purpose of this paper is to show how one can be a realist about theories without being a realist about progress. The result is a view that cannot be at odds with what the history of science shows.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Intimations of similarity: The shaky basis of verisimilitude.Peter Urbach - 1983 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 34 (3):266-275.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Verisimilitude reviewed.Graham Oddie - 1981 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 32 (3):237-265.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   28 citations  
  • Popper’s qualitative theory of verisimilitude.David Miller - 1974 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 25 (2):166-177.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   197 citations  
  • Approaching Truth by Resolving Questions.Jakob Süskind - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Getting Accurate about Knowledge.Sam Carter & Simon Goldstein - 2022 - Mind 132 (525):158-191.
    There is a large literature exploring how accuracy constrains rational degrees of belief. This paper turns to the unexplored question of how accuracy constrains knowledge. We begin by introducing a simple hypothesis: increases in the accuracy of an agent’s evidence never lead to decreases in what the agent knows. We explore various precise formulations of this principle, consider arguments in its favour, and explain how it interacts with different conceptions of evidence and accuracy. As we show, the principle has some (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • (1 other version)Science and Religion in Conflict, Part 1: Preliminaries.R. I. Damper - 2022 - Foundations of Science:1-38.
    Science and religion have been described as the “two dominant forces in our culture”. As such, the relation between them has been a matter of intense debate, having profound implications for deeper understanding of our place in the universe. One position naturally associated with scientists of a materialistic outlook is that science and religion are contradictory, incompatible worldviews; however, a great deal of recent literature criticises this “conflict thesis” as simple-minded, essentially ignorant of the nature of religion and its philosophical (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Tracking probabilistic truths: a logic for statistical learning.Alexandru Baltag, Soroush Rafiee Rad & Sonja Smets - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):9041-9087.
    We propose a new model for forming and revising beliefs about unknown probabilities. To go beyond what is known with certainty and represent the agent’s beliefs about probability, we consider a plausibility map, associating to each possible distribution a plausibility ranking. Beliefs are defined as in Belief Revision Theory, in terms of truth in the most plausible worlds. We consider two forms of conditioning or belief update, corresponding to the acquisition of two types of information: learning observable evidence obtained by (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Improve Popper and procure a perfect simulacrum of verification indistinguishable from the real thing.Nicholas Maxwell - 2021 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science.
    According to Karl Popper, science cannot verify its theories empirically, but it can falsify them, and that suffices to account for scientific progress. For Popper, a law or theory remains a pure conjecture, probability equal to zero, however massively corroborated empirically it may be. But it does just seem to be the case that science does verify empirically laws and theories. We trust our lives to such verifications when we fly in aeroplanes, cross bridges and take modern medicines. We can (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The Eclipse of Value-Free Economics. The concept of multiple self versus homo economicus.Aleksander Ostapiuk - 2020 - Wrocław, Polska: Publishing House of Wroclaw University of Economics and Business.
    The books’ goal is to answer the question: Do the weaknesses of value-free economics imply the need for a paradigm shift? The author synthesizes criticisms from different perspectives (descriptive and methodological). Special attention is paid to choices over time, because in this area value-free economics has the most problems. In that context, the enriched concept of multiple self is proposed and investigated. However, it is not enough to present the criticisms towards value-free economics. For scientists, a bad paradigm is better (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • (1 other version)Some Remarks on Popper’s Qualitative Criterion of Verisimilitude.Kit Fine - 2019 - Erkenntnis 87 (1):213-236.
    The paper sets up a general framework for defining the notion of verisimilitude. Popper’s own account of verisimilitude is then located within this framework; and his account is defended on the grounds that it can be seen to provide a reasonable structural or Pareto criterion, rather than a substantive criterion, of verisimilitude. Some other criteria of verisimilitude that may be located within the framework are also considered and their relative merits compared.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • (1 other version)A partial consequence account of truthlikeness.Gustavo Cevolani & Roberto Festa - 2018 - Synthese:1-20.
    Popper’s original definition of truthlikeness relied on a central insight: that truthlikeness combines truth and information, in the sense that a proposition is closer to the truth the more true consequences and the less false consequences it entails. As intuitively compelling as this definition may be, it is untenable, as proved long ago; still, one can arguably rely on Popper’s intuition to provide an adequate account of truthlikeness. To this aim, we mobilize some classical work on partial entailment in defining (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Realists Waiting for Godot? The Verisimilitudinarian and the Cumulative Approach to Scientific Progress.Andrea Roselli - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (5):1071-1084.
    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, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Scoring in context.Igor Douven - 2020 - Synthese 197 (4):1565-1580.
    A number of authors have recently put forward arguments pro or contra various rules for scoring probability estimates. In doing so, they have skipped over a potentially important consideration in making such assessments, to wit, that the hypotheses whose probabilities are estimated can approximate the truth to different degrees. Once this is recognized, it becomes apparent that the question of how to assess probability estimates depends heavily on context.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Idealist Origins: 1920s and Before.Martin Davies & Stein Helgeby - 2014 - In Graham Oppy & Nick Trakakis (eds.), History of Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 15-54.
    This paper explores early Australasian philosophy in some detail. Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, but it also reflected the revival of interest in Hegel through the work of ‘absolute idealists’ such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Henry Jones. A number of the early New Zealand philosophers were also educated in the idealist tradition (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Scientific progress: Four accounts.Finnur Dellsén - 2018 - Philosophy Compass 13 (11):e12525.
    Scientists are constantly making observations, carrying out experiments, and analyzing empirical data. Meanwhile, scientific theories are routinely being adopted, revised, discarded, and replaced. But when are such changes to the content of science improvements on what came before? This is the question of scientific progress. One answer is that progress occurs when scientific theories ‘get closer to the truth’, i.e. increase their degree of truthlikeness. A second answer is that progress consists in increasing theories’ effectiveness for solving scientific problems. A (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  • The objectivity of truth, a core truism?Robert Barnard & Joseph Ulatowski - 2017 - Synthese 198 (2):717-733.
    A typical guiding principle of an account of truth is: “truth is objective,” or, to be clear, judging whether an assertion is true or false depends upon how things are in the world rather than how someone or some community believes it to be. Accordingly, whenever a claim is objectively true, its truth conditions ought not depend upon the context in which it is uttered or the utterer making the claim. Part of our ongoing empirical studies surveying people’s responses to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • The Climate Wars and ‘the Pause’ – Are Both Sides Wrong?Roger Jones & James Ricketts - 2016 - Victoria University, Victoria Institute of Strategic Economic Studies.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • An impossibility theorem for verisimilitude.Sjoerd Zwart & Maarten Franssen - 2007 - Synthese 158 (1):75-92.
    In this paper, we show that Arrow’s well-known impossibility theorem is instrumental in bringing the ongoing discussion about verisimilitude to a more general level of abstraction. After some preparatory technical steps, we show that Arrow’s requirements for voting procedures in social choice are also natural desiderata for a general verisimilitude definition that places content and likeness considerations on the same footing. Our main result states that no qualitative unifying procedure of a functional form can simultaneously satisfy the requirements of Unanimity, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  • Introduction to the issue.Grzegorz Trela - 2014 - Argument: Biannual Philosophical Journal 4 (2):217-220.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • From Instrumentalism to Constructive Realism: On Some Relations Between Confirmation, Empirical Progress, and Truth Approximation.Theodorus Antonius Franciscus Kuipers - 2000 - Dordrecht, Netherland: Springer.
    Surprisingly, modified versions of the confirmation theory (Carnap and Hempel) and truth approximation theory (Popper) turn out to be smoothly sythesizable. The glue between the two appears to be the instrumentalist methodology, rather than that of the falsificationalist. The instrumentalist methodology, used in the separate, comparative evaluation of theories in terms of their successes and problems (hence, even if already falsified), provides in theory and practice the straight road to short-term empirical progress in science ( à la Laudan). It is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   154 citations  
  • Strongly semantic information and verisimilitude.Gustavo Cevolani - 2011 - Ethics and Politics (2):159-179.
    In The Philosophy of Information, Luciano Floridi presents a theory of “strongly semantic information”, based on the idea that “information encapsulates truth” (the so-called “veridicality thesis”). Starting with Popper, philosophers of science have developed different explications of the notion of verisimilitude or truthlikeness, construed as a combination of truth and information. Thus, the theory of strongly semantic information and the theory of verisimilitude are intimately tied. Yet, with few exceptions, this link has virtually pass unnoticed. In this paper, we briefly (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Lakatos and the Philosophy of Mathematics and Science: On Popper's Philosophy and its Prospects.I. Grattan-Guinness - 1979 - British Journal for the History of Science 12 (3):317-337.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Pliability and resistance: Feyerabendian insights into sophisticated realism.Luca Tambolo - 2014 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 4 (2):197-213.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Acceptance, Aggregation and Scoring Rules.Jake Chandler - 2013 - Erkenntnis 78 (1):201-217.
    As the ongoing literature on the paradoxes of the Lottery and the Preface reminds us, the nature of the relation between probability and rational acceptability remains far from settled. This article provides a novel perspective on the matter by exploiting a recently noted structural parallel with the problem of judgment aggregation. After offering a number of general desiderata on the relation between finite probability models and sets of accepted sentences in a Boolean sentential language, it is noted that a number (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Facing inconsistency: Theories and our relations to them.Michaelis Michael - 2013 - Episteme 10 (4):351-367.
    Classical logic is explosive in the face of contradiction, yet we find ourselves using inconsistent theories. Mark Colyvan, one of the prominent advocates of the indispensability argument for realism about mathematical objects, suggests that such use can be garnered to develop an argument for commitment to inconsistent objects and, because of that, a paraconsistent underlying logic. I argue to the contrary that it is open to a classical logician to make distinctions, also needed by the paraconsistent logician, which allow a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Verisimilitude and belief change for nomic conjunctive theories.Gustavo Cevolani, Roberto Festa & Theo A. F. Kuipers - 2013 - Synthese 190 (16):3307-3324.
    In this paper, we address the problem of truth approximation through theory change, asking whether revising our theories by newly acquired data leads us closer to the truth about a given domain. More particularly, we focus on “nomic conjunctive theories”, i.e., theories expressed as conjunctions of logically independent statements concerning the physical or, more generally, nomic possibilities and impossibilities of the domain under inquiry. We define both a comparative and a quantitative notion of the verisimilitude of such theories, and identify (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • Theory Status, Inductive Realism, and Approximate Truth: No Miracles, No Charades.Shelby D. Hunt - 2011 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 25 (2):159 - 178.
    The concept of approximate truth plays a prominent role in most versions of scientific realism. However, adequately conceptualizing ?approximate truth? has proved challenging. This article argues that the goal of articulating the concept of approximate truth can be advanced by first investigating the processes by which science accords theories the status of accepted or rejected. Accordingly, this article uses a path diagram model as a visual heuristic for the purpose of showing the processes in science that are involved in determining (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)Survey article. Verisimilitude: the third period.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1998 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (1):1-29.
    The modern history of verisimilitude can be divided into three periods. The first began in 1960, when Karl Popper proposed his qualitative definition of what it is for one theory to be more truthlike than another theory, and lasted until 1974, when David Miller and Pavel Trichý published their refutation of Popper's definition. The second period started immediately with the attempt to explicate truthlikeness by means of relations of similarity or resemblance between states of affairs (or their linguistic representations); the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   46 citations  
  • An Objective Justification of Bayesianism I: Measuring Inaccuracy.Hannes Leitgeb & Richard Pettigrew - 2010 - Philosophy of Science 77 (2):201-235.
    One of the fundamental problems of epistemology is to say when the evidence in an agent’s possession justifies the beliefs she holds. In this paper and its sequel, we defend the Bayesian solution to this problem by appealing to the following fundamental norm: Accuracy An epistemic agent ought to minimize the inaccuracy of her partial beliefs. In this paper, we make this norm mathematically precise in various ways. We describe three epistemic dilemmas that an agent might face if she attempts (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   157 citations  
  • Truthlikeness: Comments on recent discussion.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1978 - Synthese 38 (2):281 - 329.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   31 citations