The modern discussion on the concept of truthlikeness was started in 1960. In his influential Word and Object, W. V. O. Quine argued that Charles Peirce's definition of truth as the limit of inquiry is faulty for the reason that the notion 'nearer than' is only "defined for numbers and not for theories". In his contribution to the 1960 International Congress for Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science at Stan­ ford, Karl Popper defended the opposite view by defining a compara­tive (...) notion of verisimilitude for theories. The concept of verisimilitude was originally introduced by the Ancient sceptics to moderate their radical thesis of the inaccessibility of truth. But soon verisimilitudo, indicating likeness to the truth, was confused with probabilitas, which expresses an opiniotative attitude weaker than full certainty. The idea of truthlikeness fell in disrepute also as a result of the careless, often confused and metaphysically loaded way in which many philosophers used - and still use - such concepts as 'degree of truth', 'approximate truth', 'partial truth', and 'approach to the truth'. Popper's great achievement was his insight that the criticism against truthlikeness - by those who urge that it is meaningless to speak about 'closeness to truth' - is more based on prejudice than argument. (shrink)

Perennial philosophers' hopes are unlikely victims of swift, natural deduction. Yet anti-realism has been thought one. Not hoping for anti-realism myself I here show it, lest it be underestimated, to survive the following argument, adapted from W. D.Hart pp. 156, 164-5; he credits first publication to Fitch).

P. F. Strawson; II*—Scruton and Wright on Anti-Realism Etc., Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 77, Issue 1, 1 June 1977, Pages 15–22, https://doi.

The article begins by distinguishing a number of theses which, in the past, have sometimes been lumped together under the heading of 'anti-realism'. One of the theses is that there is something wrong with truth-conditional theories of meaning (what a truth-conditional theory of meaning is a matter discussed at some length), another is what I take to be the central thesis of anti-realism, that all truths are knowable. Several writers on the subject, such as Wright and Prawitz, have defended the (...) latter thesis while jettisoning the former. I argue that this position is exactly the wrong way around. Given the 'meaning is use' principle, which is also called the 'manifestation requirement', a very powerful case can be made that true theory of meaning cannot be truth-conditional. But I argue that, given the current state of our logical knowledge, there is no good reason for concluding from this that a true theory of meaning must be of the 'verificationist' type, as Dummett seems to think, and still less for thinking that anti-realism follows. I end by examining theories of meaning against Dummett's criticisms. (shrink)

I began this study with Laudan's argument from the pessimistic induction and I promised to show that the caloric theory of heat cannot be used to support the premisses of the meta-induction on past scientific theories. I tried to show that the laws of experimental calorimetry, adiabatic change and Carnot's theory of the motive power of heat were independent of the assumption that heat is a material substance, approximately true, deducible and accounted for within thermodynamics.I stressed that results and were (...) known to most theorists of the caloric theory and that result was put forward by the founders of the new thermodynamics. In other words, the truth-content of the caloric theory was located, selected carefully, and preserved by the founders of thermodynamics.However, the reader might think that even if I have succeeded in showing that laudan is wrong about the caloric theory, I have not shown how the strategy followed in this paper can be generalised against the pessimistic meta-induction. I think that the general strategy against Laudan's argument suggested in this paper is this: the empirical success of a mature scientific theory suggests that there are respects and degrees in which this theory is true. The difficulty for — and and real challenge to — philosophers of science is to suggest ways in which this truth-content can be located and shown to be preserved — if at all — to subsequent theories. In particular, the empirical success of a theory does not, automatically, suggest that all theoretical terms of the theory refer. On the contrary, judgments of referential success depend on which theoretical claims are well-supported by the evidence. This is a matter of specific investigation. Generally, one would expect that claims about theoretical entities which are not strongly supported by the evidence or turn out to be independent of the evidence at hand, are not compelling. For simply, if the evidence does not make it likely that our beliefs about putative theoretical entities are approximately correct, a belief in those entities would be ill-founded and unjustified. Theoretical extrapolations in science are indespensable, but they are not arbitrary. If the evidence does not warrant them I do not see why someone should commit herself to them. In a sense, the problem with empricist philisophers is not that they demand that theoretical beliefs must be warranted by evidence. Rather, it is that they claim that no evidence can warrant theorretical beliefs. A realist philosopher of science would not disagree on the first, but she has good grounds to deny the second.I argued that claims about theoretical entities which are not strongly supported by the evidence must not be taken as belief-worthy. But can one sustaon the more ambitious view that loosely supported parts of a theory tend to be just those that include non-referring terms? There is an obvious excess risk in such a generalisation. For there are well-known cases in which a theoretical claim was initially weakly supported by the evidence. (shrink)

What does it take for one proposition to be closer to the truth than another. In this, the first published monograph on the topic, Oddie develops a comprehensive theory that takes the likeness in truthlikeness seriously.

I analyze a number of widespread misconceptions concerning species. The species category, defined by a concept, denotes the rank of a species taxon in the Linnaean hierarchy. Biological species are reproducing isolated from each other, which protects the integrity of their genotypes. Degree of morphological difference is not an appropriate species definition. Unequal rates of evolution of different characters and lack of information on the mating potential of isolated populations are the major difficulties in the demarcation of species taxa.

This essay contains a partial exploration of some key concepts associated with the epistemology of realist philosophies of science. It shows that neither reference nor approximate truth will do the explanatory jobs that realists expect of them. Equally, several widely-held realist theses about the nature of inter-theoretic relations and scientific progress are scrutinized and found wanting. Finally, it is argued that the history of science, far from confirming scientific realism, decisively confutes several extant versions of avowedly 'naturalistic' forms of scientific (...) realism. (shrink)

Difficulties in arriving at an adequate conception of vagueness have led many writers to describe a phenomenon that has come to be known as "higher-order vagueness". Almost as many have found it to be a problem that needs to be addressed. In what follows I shall argue that, whilst we must acknowledge its presence, it is a pseudo-problem. The crucial point is the vagueness of "vague", which shows the phenomenon to be unproblematic though real enough.

The central question in this book is why it seems reasonable for the words of our language to divide up the world in ordinary ways rather than other imaginable ways. Hirsch calls this the division problem. His book aims to bring this problem into sharp focus, to distinguish it from various related problems, and to consider the best prospects for solving it. In exploring various possible responses to the division problem, Hirsch examines series of "division principles" which purport to express (...) rational constraints on how our words ought to classify and individuate. The ensuing discussion deals with a wide range of metaphysical and epistemological topics, including projectibility and similarity, alternative analyses of natural properties and things, the inscrutability of reference, and the relevance of such pragmatic notions as salience and economy. The final chapters of the book develop what Hirsch contends is the most promising response to the division problem: a theory in which constraints on classification and individuation are seen to derive from the necessary structure of "fine-grained" propositions and the necessary dependence of some concepts on others. (shrink)

This paper deals with the truth-Conditions and the logic for vague languages. The use of supervaluations and of classical logic is defended; and other approaches are criticized. The truth-Conditions are extended to a language that contains a definitely-Operator and that is subject to higher order vagueness.

Dorothy Edgington; X*—Meaning, Bivalence and Realism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 81, Issue 1, 1 June 1981, Pages 153–174, https://doi.org/1.

Definite descriptions, I shall argue, have two possible functions. 1] They are used to refer to what a speaker wishes to talk about, but they are also used quite differently. Moreover, a definite description occurring in one and the same sentence may, on different occasions of its use, function in either way. The failure to deal with this duality of function obscures the genuine referring use of definite descriptions. The best known theories of definite descriptions, those of Russell and Strawson, (...) I shall suggest, are both guilty of this. Before discussing this distinction in use, I will mention some features of these theories to which it is especially relevant. (shrink)

According to the well-known Kripke-Putnam view developed in Naming and Necessity and ‘The Meaning of Meaning’, proper names and ‘natural kind terms’ - words for natural substances, species, and phenomena - are non-descriptional and rigid. A singular term is rigid if it has the same referent in every possible world, and is non-descriptional if, roughly speaking, its referent is not secured by purely descriptive conditions analytically tied to the term. Thus, ‘the inventor of bifocals’ is nonrigid and descriptional, while ‘the (...) unique even and prime integer’ is rigid and descriptional, and ‘Noam Chomsky’ is rigid and non-descriptional. (shrink)

A minimal second order modal logic of natural kinds is formulated. Concepts are distinguished from properties and relations in the conceptual-logistic background of the logic through a distinction between free and bound predicate variables. Not all concepts (as indicated by free predicate variables) need have a property or relation corresponding to them (as values of bound predicate variables). Issues pertaining to identity and existence as impredicative concepts are examined and an analysis of mass terms as nominalized predicates for kinds of (...) stuff is proposed. The minimal logic is extendible through a summum genus, an infima species or a partition principle for natural kinds. (shrink)

The problem of natural kinds forms the busy crossroads where a number of larger problems meet: the problem of universals, the problem of induction and projectibility, the problem of natural laws and de re modalities, the problem of meaning and reference, the problem of intertheoretic reduction, the question of the aim of science, and the problem of scientific realism in general. Nor do these exhaust the list. Not surprisingly then, different writers confront a different ‘problem of natural kinds,’ depending on (...) which background issue is for them the principal issue at stake. The issues of essentialism, meaning, and reference, for example, have tended to dominate recent discussions of natural kinds. But evidently these are only part of the puzzle. (shrink)

The problem of natural kinds forms the busy crossroads where a number of larger problems meet: the problem of universals, the problem of induction and projectibility, the problem of natural laws and de re modalities, the problem of meaning and reference, the problem of intertheoretic reduction, the question of the aim of science, and the problem of scientific realism in general. Nor do these exhaust the list. Not surprisingly then, different writers confront a different ‘problem of natural kinds,’ depending on (...) which background issue is for them the principal issue at stake. The issues of essentialism, meaning, and reference, for example, have tended to dominate recent discussions of natural kinds. But evidently these are only part of the puzzle. (shrink)

One of the arguments advanced in favor of scientific realism is the 'miracle argument'. It says that for the anti-realist the predictive success of science appears as an utter miracle. This argument indeed has some prima facie plausibility, provided that it is sharpened by construing "predictive success" as prediction of previously unknown laws and the occurrence of a consilience of inductions. Still, the history of science teaches us that it is possible to arrive at predictive success in this sense by (...) employing radically non-referring theoretical mechanisms. The 'miracle argument' is thus unsound. Rather, the capacity of a theory to generate predictive success can be traced back to its "classificativity correspondence.". (shrink)

In this sequence of philosophical essays about natural science, the author argues that fundamental explanatory laws, the deepest and most admired successes of modern physics, do not in fact describe regularities that exist in nature. Cartwright draws from many real-life examples to propound a novel distinction: that theoretical entities, and the complex and localized laws that describe them, can be interpreted realistically, but the simple unifying laws of basic theory cannot.

There is an important family of philosophical positions which deserve the name “realism”, and there is a natural diagnosis of what all these positions share in common. There is also an important family of philosophical positions which deserve the name “antirealism”, and there is a natural diagnosis of what all these positions share in common. These two families are feuding, but the nature of the conflict between them is far from clear. When we extract the definition which realists would give (...) for their position, and the definition antirealists would give for their position, we find that the antirealists do not see themselves as denying quite the same thing that the realists see themselves as asserting. I will begin by discussing the self-definition of some realists. (shrink)

There is an important family of philosophical positions which deserve the name “realism”, and there is a natural diagnosis of what all these positions share in common. There is also an important family of philosophical positions which deserve the name “antirealism”, and there is a natural diagnosis of what all these positions share in common. These two families are feuding, but the nature of the conflict between them is far from clear. When we extract the definition which realists would give (...) for their position, and the definition antirealists would give for their position, we find that the antirealists do not see themselves as denying quite the same thing that the realists see themselves as asserting. I will begin by discussing the self-definition of some realists. (shrink)

First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this festschrift for the eminent philosopher Hilary Putnam, a team of distinguished philosophers write on a broad range of topics and thus reflect the remarkably fertile and provocative research of Putnam himself. The volume is not merely a celebration of a man, but also a report on the state of philosophy in a number of significant areas. The essays fall naturally into three groups: a central core on the theme of conventionality and content in the philosophy of mind, language, (...) and science, and two smaller sections on the relationship of ethics and language, and on the philosophy of logic and aesthetics. (shrink)