Abstract
An epistemic notion of verisimilitude (as the ‘degree in which a theory seems closer to the full truth to a scientific community’) is defined in several ways. Application to the structuralist description of theories is carried out by introducing a notion of ‘empirical regularity’ in structuralist terms. It is argued that these definitions of verisimilitude can be used to give formal reconstructions of scientific methodologies such as falsificationism, conventionalism and normal science.
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I want to express my gratitude to the Philosophical Society of Finland for inviting me to take part in a seminar on ‘Structuralism, Idealization and Approximation’, held in Helsinki in September-October 1993, and that to a large extent has been the main encouragement to develop the theory I am presenting here. I am also thankful to Professors Theo Kuipers and C. Ulises Moulines, who criticized some previous versions of this paper.
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Zamora Bonilla, J.P. Verisimilitude, structuralism and scientific progress. Erkenntnis 44, 25–47 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00172852
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00172852