Abstract
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 of Oddie’s new defense of the average measure and Kuipers’ refined definition of truth approximation.
Highlights
I met Gerhard Schurz for the first time in July 1983 in Salzburg, where he worked as a post doc with Professor Paul Weingartner
While I was talking about realism and scientific progress, he presented a paper “A New Definition of Verisimilitude and Applications”
Its basic idea was to rescue Karl Popper’s comparative definition of verisimilitude, which had been refuted by Miller (1974) and Tichý (1974), by restricting the truth and falsity contents of a theory to its relevant consequences
Summary
I met Gerhard Schurz for the first time in July 1983 in Salzburg, where he worked as a post doc with Professor Paul Weingartner. I added that examples of this sort seem to prove that a satisfactory general definition of verisimilitude cannot be given merely by the concepts of truth value and deduction (whatever restrictions are given to the latter notion), but we need a concept of distance or similarity Schurz sent his reply in a letter on October 3, 1986. He agreed with the judgment of my example, but pointed out that it presupposes that one can compare p and q for their verisimilitude, whereas his theorem 5.3 concerns qualitative cases without any “internal metric” for primitive predicates or propositions.
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