Online research in philosophy

A holistic account of the meaning of theoretical terms leads scientific realism into serious troubles. Alternative methods of reference fixing are needed by a realist who wishes to show how reference invariance is possible in spite of meaning variance. This paper argues that the similarity theory of truthlikeness and approximate truth, developed by logicians since the mid 1970s, helps to make precise the idea of charitable theoretical reference. Comparisons to the recent proposals by Kitcher and Psillos are given. This argument helps to undermine the scepticist meta-induction about theories, and thereby to reevaluate Laudan's alleged confutation of scientific realism.

J. P. Z. Bonilla's methodological approach to truthlikeness is evaluated critically. On a more general level, various senses in which the theory of truthlikeness could be seen as a theory concerned with methodology are distinguished, and it is argued that providing speical sciences with methodological tools is unrealistic as an aim of the theory of verisimilitude. Rather, when developing this theory, one should rest contnet with the more modest aim of conceptual analysis, or of providing explications for the relational concept of being closer to the truth. In addition, some remarks will be made on the difficulties which the similarity approach to truthlikeness has in realizing this aim and which are caused by the important role that Hintikka's constituents have in it.

This paper proposes a solution to David Miller's Minnesotan-Arizonan demonstration of the language dependence of truthlikeness (Miller 1974), along with Miller's first-order demonstration of the same (Miller 1978). It is assumed, with Peter Urbach, that the implication of these demonstrations is that the very notion of truthlikeness is intrinsically language dependent and thus non-objective. As such, truthlikeness cannot supply a basis for an objective account of scientific progress. I argue that, while Miller is correct in arguing that the number of true atomic sentences of a false theory is language dependent, the number of known sentences (under certain straightforward assumptions) is conserved by translation; degree of knowledge, unlike truthlikeness, is thus a linguistically invariant notion. It is concluded that the objectivity of scientific progress must be grounded on the fact (noted in Cohen 1980) that knowledge, not mere truth, is the aim of science.

In this paper it is shown that, in spite of their intuitive starting points, Kuipers' accounts lead to counterintuitive consequences. The counterintuitive results of Kuipers' account of H-D confirmation stem from the fact that Kuipers explicates a concept of partial (as opposed to full) confirmation. It is shown that Schurz-Weingartner's relevant-element approach as well as Gemes' content-part approach provide an account of full confirmation that does not lead to these counterintuitive results. One of the unwelcome results of Kuipers' account of nomic truthlikeness is the consequence that a theory Y, in order to be more truthlike than a theory X (where Y and X are incompatible), must imply the entire nomic truth. It is shown how the relevant-element approach to truthlikeness avoids this result.

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.

The naive structuralist definition of truthlikeness is an idealization in the sense that it assumes that all mistaken models of a theory are equally bad. The natural concretization is a refined definition based on an underlying notion of structurelikeness.In Section 1 the naive definition of truthlikeness of theories is presented, using a new conceptual justification, in terms of instantial and explanatory mistakes.

The most elaborate recent accounts of truthlikeness (verisimilitude) apply this notion primarily to generalizations in first-order languages with qualitative predicates. This paper outlines a new approach to the definition of truthlikeness for quantitative statements, including singular statements (point estimation), interval statements (interval estimation), and quantitative laws. In the case of laws, the basic issue is reduced to the topological problem of measuring the distance between two real-valued functions. The solution of this problem makes it possible to define also the notion of approximate truth for quantitative laws.

The purpose of this paper is to look at some existing methods of semantic information quantification and suggest some alternatives. It begins with an outline of Bar-Hillel and Carnap’s theory of semantic information before going on to look at Floridi’s theory of strongly semantic information. The latter then serves to initiate an in-depth investigation into the idea of utilising the notion of truthlikeness to quantify semantic information. Firstly, a couple of approaches to measure truthlikeness are drawn from the literature and explored, with a focus on their applicability to semantic information quantification. Secondly, a similar but new approach to measure truthlikeness/information is presented and some supplementary points are made.

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.

Many scientific realists think that the best reasons for scientific theories are abductive, i.e., must appeal to what is also called inference to the best explanation (IBE), while some anti-realists have argued that the use of abduction in defending realism is question-begging, circular, or incoherent. This paper studies the idea that abductive inference can be reformulated by taking its conclusion to concern the truthlikeness of a hypothetical theory on the basis of its success in explanation and prediction. The strength of such arguments is measured by the estimated verisimilitude of its conclusion given the premises. It is argued that this formulation helps to make precise and justifies the "ultimate argument for scientific realism": the empirical success of scientific theories would be a miracle unless they are truthlike.