A semantic approach to comparative verisimilitude
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (4):563-581 (1995)
| Abstract | The importance of the comparative notion of versimilitude, or truthlikeness, for a realist conception of knowledge follows from two modest ‘realist’ assumptions, namely, that the aim of an enquiry, as an enquiry, is the truth of some matter; and that one false theory may realize this aim better than another. However, there seem to be two ways in which one (false) theory can realize this aim better than another. One (false) theory can be closer to the truth than another either by being preponderantly more accurate in its predictions or by providing more comprehensive information about the system (or class of systems) at issue. This paper presents a model-theoretic approach to the analysis of the comprehensiveness-related component of the comparative notion of versimilitude. The machinery of the ‘semantic’ view of theories is applied to the problem of providing necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of sentences of the form, ‘B is truth-increasing with respect to A’, where A and B are taken to be sets of structures. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,705 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesLuciano Floridi (2005). Is Semantic Information Meaningful Data? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (2):351-370.
Steven French & Juha Saatsi (2006). Realism About Structure: The Semantic View and Nonlinguistic Representations. Philosophy of Science 73 (5):548-559.
J. A. Burgess (1997). Supervaluations and the Propositional Attitude Constraint. Journal of Philosophical Logic 26 (1):103-119.
Joseph Wayne Smith (1984). What is Wrong with Verisimilitude. Philosophy Research Archives 10:511-541.
J. Salerno (2000). Revising the Logic of Logical Revision. Philosophical Studies 99 (2):211-227.
Herbert Keuth (1976). Verisimilitude or the Approach to the Whole Truth. Philosophy of Science 43 (3):311-336.
Jesús P. Zamora Bonilla (1992). Truthlikeness Without Truth: A Methodological Approach. Synthese 93 (3):343 - 372.
I. A. Kieseppä (1996). On the Aim of the Theory of Verisimilitude. Synthese 107 (3):421 - 438.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads8 ( #123,218 of 549,550 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,397 of 549,550 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
