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Refined Verisimilitude

Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers (2001)

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  1. MOND and Methodology.David Merritt - 2021 - In Parusniková Zuzana & Merritt David (eds.), Karl Popper's Science and Philosophy. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. pp. 69-96.
    In Logik der Forschung (1934) and later works, Karl Popper proposed a set of methodological rules for scientists. Among these were requirements that theories should evolve in the direction of increasing content, and that new theories should only be accepted if some of their novel predictions are experimentally confirmed. There are currently two, viable theories of cosmology: the standard cosmological model, and a theory due to Mordehai Milgrom called MOND. Both theories can point to successes and failures, but only MOND (...)
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  • Approaching probabilistic truths: introduction to the Topical Collection.Ilkka Niiniluoto, Gustavo Cevolani & Theo Kuipers - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-8.
    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 (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Verisimilitude and Belief Change for Conjunctive Theories.Gustavo Cevolani, Vincenzo Crupi & Roberto Festa - 2011 - Erkenntnis 75 (2):183-202.
    Theory change is a central concern in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science. In this paper, we investigate the relationships between two ongoing research programs providing formal treatments of theory change: the (post-Popperian) approach to verisimilitude and the AGM theory of belief change. We show that appropriately construed accounts emerging from those two lines of epistemological research do yield convergences relative to a specified kind of theories, here labeled “conjunctive”. In this domain, a set of plausible conditions are identified which (...)
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  • (1 other version)Truthlikeness: old and new debates.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1990 - Synthese 84 (1):139-152.
    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 (...)
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  • 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. (...)
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  • The logic of empirical theories revisited.Johan van Benthem - 2012 - Synthese 186 (3):775-792.
    Logic and philosophy of science share a long history, though contacts have gone through ups and downs. This paper is a brief survey of some major themes in logical studies of empirical theories, including links to computer science and current studies of rational agency. The survey has no new results: we just try to make some things into common knowledge.
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  • Basic and Refined Nomic Truth Approximation by Evidence-Guided Belief Revision in AGM-Terms.Theo A. F. Kuipers - 2011 - Erkenntnis 75 (2):223-236.
    Straightforward theory revision, taking into account as effectively as possible the established nomic possibilities and, on their basis induced empirical laws, is conducive for (unstratified) nomic truth approximation. The question this paper asks is: is it possible to reconstruct the relevant theory revision steps, on the basis of incoming evidence, in AGM-terms? A positive answer will be given in two rounds, first for the case in which the initial theory is compatible with the established empirical laws, then for the case (...)
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  • Approaching Truth in Conceptual Spaces.Gustavo Cevolani - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (6):1485-1500.
    Knowledge representation is a central issue in a number of areas, but few attempts are usually made to bridge different approaches accross different fields. As a contribution in this direction, in this paper I focus on one such approach, the theory of conceptual spaces developed within cognitive science, and explore its potential applications in the fields of philosophy of science and formal epistemology. My case-study is provided by the theory of truthlikeness, construed as closeness to “the whole truth” about a (...)
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  • 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, (...)
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  • The content, consequence and likeness approaches to verisimilitude: compatibility, trivialization, and underdetermination.Graham Oddie - 2013 - Synthese 190 (9):1647-1687.
    Theories of verisimilitude have routinely been classified into two rival camps—the content approach and the likeness approach—and these appear to be motivated by very different sets of data and principles. The question thus naturally arises as to whether these approaches can be fruitfully combined. Recently Zwart and Franssen (Synthese 158(1):75–92, 2007) have offered precise analyses of the content and likeness approaches, and shown that given these analyses any attempt to meld content and likeness orderings violates some basic desiderata. Unfortunately their (...)
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  • (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 (...)
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  • Belief merging with the aim of truthlikeness.Simon D’Alfonso - 2016 - Synthese 193 (7):2013-2034.
    The merging/fusion of belief/data collections in propositional logic form is a topic that has received due attention within the domains of database and AI research. A distinction can be made between two types of scenarios to which the process of merging can be applied. In the first type, the collections represent preferences, such as the voting choices of a group of people, that need to be aggregated so as to give a consistent result that in some way best represents the (...)
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  • Models, postulates, and generalized nomic truth approximation.Theo A. F. Kuipers - 2016 - Synthese 193 (10).
    The qualitative theory of nomic truth approximation, presented in Kuipers in his, in which ‘the truth’ concerns the distinction between nomic, e.g. physical, possibilities and impossibilities, rests on a very restrictive assumption, viz. that theories always claim to characterize the boundary between nomic possibilities and impossibilities. Fully recognizing two different functions of theories, viz. excluding and representing, this paper drops this assumption by conceiving theories in development as tuples of postulates and models, where the postulates claim to exclude nomic impossibilities (...)
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  • Progress as Approximation to the Truth: A Defence of the Verisimilitudinarian Approach.Gustavo Cevolani & Luca Tambolo - 2013 - Erkenntnis 78 (4):921-935.
    In this paper we provide a compact presentation of the verisimilitudinarian approach to scientific progress (VS, for short) and defend it against the sustained attack recently mounted by Alexander Bird (2007). Advocated by such authors as Ilkka Niiniluoto and Theo Kuipers, VS is the view that progress can be explained in terms of the increasing verisimilitude (or, equivalently, truthlikeness, or approximation to the truth) of scientific theories. According to Bird, VS overlooks the central issue of the appropriate grounding of scientific (...)
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  • (1 other version)Truthlikeness: old and new debates.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2020 - Synthese 197 (4):1581-1599.
    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 (...)
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  • Testing Inference To The Best Explanation.Igor Douven - 2002 - Synthese 130 (3):355-377.
    Inference to the Best Explanation has become the subject of a livelydebate in the philosophy of science. Scientific realists maintain, while scientificantirealists deny, that it is a compelling rule of inference. It seems that anyattempt to settle this debate empirically must beg the question against theantirealist. The present paper argues that this impression is misleading. A methodis described that, by combining Glymour's theory of bootstrapping and Hacking'sarguments from microscopy, allows us to test IBE without begging any antirealistissues.
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  • Approaching probabilistic and deterministic nomic truths in an inductive probabilistic way.Theo A. F. Kuipers - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):8001-8028.
    Theories of truth approximation in terms of truthlikeness almost always deal with approaching deterministic truths, either actual or nomic. This paper deals first with approaching a probabilistic nomic truth, viz. a true probability distribution. It assumes a multinomial probabilistic context, hence with a lawlike true, but usually unknown, probability distribution. We will first show that this true multinomial distribution can be approached by Carnapian inductive probabilities. Next we will deal with the corresponding deterministic nomic truth, that is, the set of (...)
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  • (1 other version)A partial consequence account of truthlikeness.Gustavo Cevolani & Roberto Festa - 2020 - Synthese 197 (4):1627-1646.
    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 (...)
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  • Belief Revision and Verisimilitude Based on Preference and Truth Orderings.Gerard Renardel de Lavalette & Sjoerd Zwart - 2011 - Erkenntnis 75 (2):237-254.
    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.
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