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Ilkka Niiniluoto [182]Ilkka Maunu Niiniluoto [1]
  1. Critical scientific realism.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1999 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    This book comes to the rescue of scientific realism, showing that reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Philosophical realism holds that the aim of a particular discourse is to make true statements about its subject matter. Ilkka Niiniluoto surveys different kinds of realism in various areas of philosophy and then sets out his own critical realist philosophy of science.
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  2. Truth-Seeking by Abduction.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2018 - Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
    This book examines the philosophical conception of abductive reasoning as developed by Charles S. Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism. It explores the historical and systematic connections of Peirce's original ideas and debates about their interpretations. Abduction is understood in a broad sense which covers the discovery and pursuit of hypotheses and inference to the best explanation. The analysis presents fresh insights into this notion of reasoning, which derives from effects to causes or from surprising observations to explanatory theories. The (...)
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  3. Scientific progress as increasing verisimilitude.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 46:73-77.
    According to the foundationalist picture, shared by many rationalists and positivist empiricists, science makes cognitive progress by accumulating justified truths. Fallibilists, who point out that complete certainty cannot be achieved in empirical science, can still argue that even successions of false theories may progress toward the truth. This proposal was supported by Karl Popper with his notion of truthlikeness or verisimilitude. Popper’s own technical definition failed, but the idea that scientific progress means increasing truthlikeness can be expressed by defining degrees (...)
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  4. Optimistic realism about scientific progress.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2017 - Synthese 194 (9):3291-3309.
    Scientific realists use the “no miracle argument” to show that the empirical and pragmatic success of science is an indicator of the ability of scientific theories to give true or truthlike representations of unobservable reality. While antirealists define scientific progress in terms of empirical success or practical problem-solving, realists characterize progress by using some truth-related criteria. This paper defends the definition of scientific progress as increasing truthlikeness or verisimilitude. Antirealists have tried to rebut realism with the “pessimistic metainduction”, but critical (...)
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  5.  41
    Truthlikeness.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1987 - Dordrecht: Reidel.
    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 (...)
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  6. Defending abduction.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1999 - Philosophy of Science 66 (3):451.
    Charles S. Peirce argued that, besides deduction and induction, there is a third mode of inference which he called " hypothesis " or " abduction." He characterized abduction as reasoning " from effect to cause," and as " the operation of adopting an explanatory hypothesis." Peirce ' s ideas about abduction, which are related also to historically earlier accounts of heuristic reasoning, have been seen as providing a logic of scientific discovery. Alternatively, abduction is interpreted as giving reasons for pursuing (...)
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  7.  14
    Theoretical concepts and hypothetico-inductive inference.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1973 - Boston,: D. Reidel Pub. Co.. Edited by Raimo Tuomela.
    Conceptual change and its connection to the development of new seien tific theories has reeently beeome an intensively discussed topic in philo sophieal literature. Even if the inductive aspects related to conceptual change have already been discussed to some extent, there has so far existed no systematic treatment of inductive change due to conceptual enrichment. This is what we attempt to accomplish in this work, al though most of our technical results are restricted to the framework of monadic languages. We (...)
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  8. (2 other versions)Scientific progress.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1980 - Synthese 45 (3):427 - 462.
  9. (1 other version)Survey article. Verisimilitude: the third period.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1998 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (1):1-29.
    The modern history of verisimilitude can be divided into three periods. The first began in 1960, when Karl Popper proposed his qualitative definition of what it is for one theory to be more truthlike than another theory, and lasted until 1974, when David Miller and Pavel Trichý published their refutation of Popper's definition. The second period started immediately with the attempt to explicate truthlikeness by means of relations of similarity or resemblance between states of affairs (or their linguistic representations); the (...)
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  10.  45
    L. J. Cohen versus Bayesianism.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1981 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (3):349-349.
  11. The aim and structure of applied research.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1993 - Erkenntnis 38 (1):1 - 21.
    The distinction between basic and applied research is notoriously vague, despite its frequent use in science studies and in science policy. In most cases it is based on such pragmatic factors as the knowledge and intentions of the investigator or the type of research institute. Sometimes the validity of the distinction is denied altogether. This paper suggests that there are two ways of distinguishing systematically between basic and applied research: (i) in terms of the utilities that define the aims of (...)
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  12. Is Science Progressive?Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1987 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 38 (2):272-276.
     
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  13.  32
    The Logic and epistemology of scientific change.Ilkka Niiniluoto & Raimo Tuomela (eds.) - 1979 - Amsterdam: North-Holland Pub. Co..
  14.  47
    Truth-Seeking by Abduction.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2004 - Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook 11:57-82.
    In a seminar with the title “Deduction and Induction in the Sciences”, it is intriguing to ask the following questions: Is there a third type of inference besides deduction and induction? Does this third type of inference play a significant role within scientific inquiry? A positive answer to both of these questions was advocated by Charles S. Peirce throughout his career, even though his opinions changed in important ways during the fifty years between 1865 and 1914. Peirce called the third (...)
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  15. Truthlikeness: Comments on recent discussion.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1978 - Synthese 38 (2):281 - 329.
  16. Revising Beliefs Towards the Truth.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2011 - Erkenntnis 75 (2):165-181.
    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 (...)
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  17. Novel facts and bayesianism.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1983 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 34 (4):375-379.
  18. Theories, approximations, and idealizations.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1990 - Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 16:9-57.
  19.  71
    Analogy and inductive logic.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1981 - Erkenntnis 16 (1):1 - 34.
  20. Essays on Mathematical and Philosophical Logic.Jaakko Hintikka, Ilkka Niiniluoto & Esa Saarinen - 1982 - Studia Logica 41 (4):432-433.
     
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  21. Inductive systematization: Definition and a critical survey.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1972 - Synthese 25 (1-2):25 - 81.
    In 1958, to refute the argument known as the theoretician's dilemma, Hempel suggested that theoretical terms might be logically indispensable for inductive systematization of observational statements. This thesis, in some form or another, has later been supported by Scheffler, Lehrer, and Tuomela, and opposed by Bohnert, Hooker, Stegmüller, and Cornman. In this paper, a critical survey of this discussion is given. Several different putative definitions of the crucial notion inductive systematization achieved by a theory are discussed by reference to the (...)
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  22.  63
    Explanation by Idealized Theories.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2018 - Kairos 20 (1):43-63.
    The use of idealized scientific theories in explanations of empirical facts and regularities is problematic in two ways: they don’t satisfy the condition that the explanans is true, and they may fail to entail the explanandum. An attempt to deal with the latter problem was proposed by Hempel and Popper with their notion of approximate explanation. A more systematic perspective on idealized explanations was developed with the method of idealization and concretization by the Poznan school in the 1970s. If idealizational (...)
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  23.  74
    Social aspects of scientific knowledge.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2020 - Synthese 197 (1):447-468.
    From its inception in 1987 social epistemology has been divided into analytic and critical approaches, represented by Alvin I. Goldman and Steve Fuller, respectively. In this paper, the agendas and some basic ideas of ASE and CSE are compared and assessed by bringing into the discussion also other participants of the debates on the social aspects of scientific knowledge—among them Raimo Tuomela, Philip Kitcher and Helen Longino. The six topics to be analyzed include individual and collective epistemic agents; the notion (...)
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  24.  26
    (1 other version)Truthlikeness: old and new debates.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1990 - Synthese 84 (1):139-152.
    The notion of truthlikeness or verisimilitude has been a topic of intensive discussion ever since the definition proposed by Karl Popper was refuted in 1974. This paper gives an analysis of old and new debates about this notion. There is a fairly large agreement about the truthlikeness ordering of conjunctive theories, but the main rival approaches differ especially about false disjunctive theories. Continuing the debate between Niiniluoto’s min-sum measure and Schurz’s relevant consequence measure, the paper also gives a critical assessment (...)
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  25.  96
    Truthlikeness and bayesian estimation.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1986 - Synthese 67 (2):321 - 346.
  26.  39
    Approaching probabilistic truths: introduction to the Topical Collection.Ilkka Niiniluoto, Gustavo Cevolani & Theo Kuipers - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-8.
    After Karl Popper’s original work, several approaches were developed to provide a sound explication of the notion of verisimilitude. With few exceptions, these contributions have assumed that the truth to be approximated is deterministic. This collection of ten papers addresses the more general problem of approaching probabilistic truths. They include attempts to find appropriate measures for the closeness to probabilistic truth and to evaluate claims about such distances on the basis of empirical evidence. The papers employ multiple analytical approaches, and (...)
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  27. Dretske on laws of nature.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1978 - Philosophy of Science 45 (3):431-439.
    In a recent article [4], Fred I. Dretske has proposed a new analysis of natural laws. Dretske rejects the more or less standard view which says that laws are universal truths with a special function or status in science. As an alternative account, he suggests that laws are expressed by singular statements describing the relationship between universal properties and magnitudes: the statement It is a law that F's are G's3.is to be analysed as F-ness ↦ G-ness.I shall argue, however, that (...)
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  28.  92
    Statistical explanation reconsidered.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1981 - Synthese 48 (3):437 - 472.
  29. (1 other version)Abduction and truthlikeness.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2005 - Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 83 (1):255-275.
    This paper studies the interplay between two notions which are important for the project of defending scientific realism: abduction and truthlikeness. The main focus is the generalization of abduction to cases where the conclusion states that the best theory is truthlike or approximately true. After reconstructing the recent proposals of Theo Kuipers within the framework of monadic predicate logic, I apply my own notion of truthlikeness. It turns out that a theory with higher truthlikeness does not always have greater empirical (...)
     
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  30.  40
    Truthlikeness for Quantitative Statements.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1982 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1982:208 - 216.
    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 (...)
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  31. Realism, relativism, and constructivism.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1991 - Synthese 89 (1):135 - 162.
    This paper gives a critical evaluation of the philosophical presuppositions and implications of two current schools in the sociology of knowledge: the Strong Programme of Bloor and Barnes; and the Constructivism of Latour and Knorr-Cetina. Bloor's arguments for his externalist symmetry thesis (i.e., scientific beliefs must always be explained by social factors) are found to be incoherent or inconclusive. At best, they suggest a Weak Programme of the sociology of science: when theoretical preferences in a scientific community, SC, are first (...)
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  32. Reference invariance and truthlikeness.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1997 - Philosophy of Science 64 (4):546-554.
    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 (...)
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  33. Degrees of truthlikeness: From singular sentences to generalisations.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1979 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 30 (4):371-376.
  34.  39
    Evaluation of theories.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2007 - In Theo A. F. Kuipers (ed.), General philosophy of science. London: North Holland. pp. 175--217.
  35.  23
    Abduction, tomography, and other inverse problems.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2011 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 42 (1):135-139.
    Charles S. Peirce introduced in the late 19th century the notion of abduction as inference from effects to causes, or from observational data to explanatory theories. Abductive reasoning has become a major theme in contemporary logic, philosophy of science, and artificial intelligence. This paper argues that the new growing branch of applied mathematics called inverse problems deals successfully with various kinds of abductive inference within a variety of scientific disciplines. The fundamental theorem about the inverse reconstruction of plane functions from (...)
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  36.  21
    On the Philosophy of Applied Social Sciences.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2013 - In Hanne Andersen, Dennis Dieks, Wenceslao J. Gonzalez, Thomas Uebel & Gregory Wheeler (eds.), New Challenges to Philosophy of Science. Springer Verlag. pp. 265--274.
  37.  40
    The development of the Hintikka program.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2004 - In Dov M. Gabbay, John Woods & Akihiro Kanamori (eds.), Handbook of the history of logic. Boston: Elsevier. pp. 311-356.
  38. What shall we do with verisimilitude?Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1982 - Philosophy of Science 49 (2):181-197.
    Popper distinguishes the problems of theoretical and pragmatic preference between rival theories, but he claims that there is a common non-inductive solution to both of them, viz. the "best-tested theory", or the theory with the highest degree of corroboration. He further suggests that the degrees of corroboration serve as indicators of verisimilitude. One may therefore raise the question whether the recent theory of verisimilitude gives a general non-inductive solution to the problem of theoretical preference. This paper argues that this is (...)
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  39.  44
    Theory change, truthlikeness, and belief revision.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2010 - In M. Dorato M. Suàrez (ed.), Epsa Epistemology and Methodology of Science. Springer. pp. 189--199.
  40.  30
    Values in design sciences.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 46:11-15.
    Following Herbert Simon’s idea of “the sciences of the artificial”, one may contrast descriptive sciences and design sciences: the former are concerned with “how things are”, the latter tell us “how things ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function”. Typical results of design sciences are thus expressions about means—ends relations or technical norms in G. H. von Wright’s sense. Theorizing and modeling are important methods of giving a value-free epistemic justification for such technical norms. The values (...)
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  41.  68
    10 Truthlikeness and economic theories.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2002 - In Uskali Mäki (ed.), Fact and Fiction in Economics: Models, Realism and Social Construction. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 214.
    In a series of carefully argued and stimulating papers on realism, Usakli Maki has pointed out that economic theories typically are unrealistic in two senses: by violating "the-whole-truth" and "nothing-but-the-truth" (Maki 1989, 1992b, 1994b). He suggests that realism in economics can still be rescued by regarding theories as partially true descriptions of essences and as lawlike statements about tendencies. In this chapter, I defend realism by an alternative strategy: idealizational (or "isolational") statements are counterfactual conditional (Niiniluoto 1986), and the concepts (...)
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  42.  93
    Tarski's definition and truth-makers.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2004 - Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 126 (1-3):57-76.
    A hallmark of correspondence theories of truth is the principle that sentences are made true by some truth-makers. A well-known objection to treating Tarski’s definition of truth as a correspondence theory has been put forward by Donald Davidson. He argued that Tarski’s approach does not relate sentences to any entities (like facts) to which true sentences might correspond. From the historical viewpoint, it is interesting to observe that Tarski’s philosophical teacher Tadeusz Kotarbinski advocated an ontological doctrine of reism which accepted (...)
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  43.  46
    The Significance of Verisimilitude.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1984 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1984:591 - 613.
    The concept of verisimilitude is an indispensable tool for the fallibilist and realist epistemology. Part of the argument for this thesis consists in the important applications of this notion within the history and philosophy of science. But perhaps the harder part is to convince a sceptical reader of the existence of this concept. A general programme for defining and estimating degrees of truthlikeness for various kinds of scientific statements is outlined in some detail. Ten years after Miller's and Tichy's refutation (...)
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  44.  21
    Theories of Truth: Vienna, Berlin, and Warsaw.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1999 - Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook 6:17-26.
    Neo-Kantian philosophers sometimes divided the history of philosophy in three periods: philosophy before Kant, Kant, and philosophy after Kant. The admirers of Alfred Tarski are prone, with good justification, to propose a similar division of theories of truth. But even in our post-Tarskian period, the nature and significance of Tarski’s theory of truth is still a matter of controversy.1 Therefore, to understand better Tarski’s achievement and some of our present puzzles, it is instructive to go back to the pre-Tarskian problem (...)
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  45.  25
    Approaching probabilistic laws.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):10499-10519.
    In the general problem of verisimilitude, we try to define the distance of a statement from a target, which is an informative truth about some domain of investigation. For example, the target can be a state description, a structure description, or a constituent of a first-order language. In the problem of legisimilitude, the target is a deterministic or universal law, which can be expressed by a nomic constituent or a quantitative function involving the operators of physical necessity and possibility. The (...)
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  46.  54
    Representation and Truthlikeness.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2014 - Foundations of Science 19 (4):375-379.
    Woosuk Park’s paper “Misrepresentation in Context” is a useful plea for a theory of representation with promising interaction between cognitive science, philosophy of science, and aesthetics. In this paper, I argue that such a unified account is provided by Charles S. Peirce’s semiotics. This theory puts Park’s criticism of Nelson Goodman and Jerry Fodor in context. Some of Park’s pertinent remarks on the problem of misrepresentation can be illuminated by the account of truthlikeness and idealization developed by philosophers of science.
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  47. On explicating verisimilitude: A reply to Oddie.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1982 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 33 (3):290-296.
  48.  51
    Idealization, counterfactuals, and truthlikeness.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2007 - In Jerzy Brzezinski, Andrzej Klawiter, Theo A. F. Kuipers, Krzysztof Lastowski, Katarzyna Paprzycka & Piotr Przybysz (eds.), The Courage of Doing Philosophy: Essays Dedicated to Leszek Nowak. Rodopi. pp. 103--122.
  49. Verisimilitude: Why and How.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2017 - In Stefano Gattei & Nimrod Bar-Am (eds.), Encouraging Openness: Essays for Joseph Agassi on the Occasion of His 90th Birthday. Cham: Springer Verlag.
     
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  50.  39
    Igor Douven, The Art of Abduction.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2024 - Journal of Philosophy 121 (3):175-179.
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