Volume 24, 1985
Joseph Agassi
Pages 47-58
On Hugo Bergman's Contribution to Epistemology
Approximationism — science approximates the truth as an ideal — is the view of science implicit in all of Einstein's major works, heralded by Hugo Bergman in Hebrew in 1940 and expressed by Karl Popper in 1954 and 1956. Yet Bergman was not sufficiently clear about it, and even Popper is not - as shown by their not giving up certain remnants of the older views which approximationism replaces, even when these remnants are inconsistent with approximationism. Nor
are the approximationist theories of these authors satisfactory solutions to all the problems which traditional epistemologies purported to solve. Approxiamtionism still is a program rather than a fully blown theory.