TRUTHLIKENESS WITH A HUMAN FACE: ON SOME CONNECTIONS BETWEEN THE THEORY OF VERISIMILITUDE AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

Abstract

Verisimilitude theorists (and many scientific realists) assume that science attempts to provide hypotheses with an increasing degree of closeness to the full truth; on the other hand, radical sociologists of science assert that flesh and bone scientists struggle to attain much more mundane goals (such as income, power, fame, and so on). This paper argues that both points of view can be made compatible, for (1) rational individuals only would be interested in engaging in a strong competition (such as that described by radical sociologists) if they knew in advance the rules which their outcomes are to be assessed, and (2), if these rules have to be chosen under a veil of ignorance (i.e., before knowing what specific theory each scientist is going to devise), then rules favoring highly verisimilar theories can be prefered by researchers to other methodological rules. The theory of verisimilitude is a theory about the aim of science. In a well known paper (Popper 1972), written before developing his own approach to the topic of verisimilitude, Popper described that aim as the production of testable explanations of whatever facts we thought to be interesting to explain, though he also recognised that it was rather improper to talk about the aims of science, since only scientists have goals, properly speaking, and these may look for a wide variety of things. Most discussions about the concept of have obviously been concerned with the first of these questions � say, what is the cognitive goal of science, assuming that one such goal exists � but they have largely ignored the second one, i.e., what the connection may be between that epistemic goal and the actual motivations and behavior of scientists. In this brief paper I would like to make a contribution to the second topic, though the ideas I am going to suggest will perhaps illuminate some aspects of the first question. To cut a long story short, I defend here three hypotheses. The first is that, besides other interests, scientists have epistemic ones that can be reconstructed as the pursuit of a kind of truthlikeness (for example, the notion of proposed by Kuipers; see note 4 below). My second hypothesis is that scientists can engage in the negotiation of a