What Is Closer-to-the-Truth: A Parade of Approaches to Truthlikeness (Pozan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, Vol. 10) (Pozan ... of the Sciences and the Humanities, Vol 10)

When Karl Popper published in 19631 his definition of closer-to-the-truth this was an important intellectual event, but not a shocking one. Everybody could react by saying that the definition was as it should be, and even that it could have been expected. For plausible the definition was indeed: a theory is closer to the truth than another one if the first has more true and less false consequences than the second. About ten years later the 1963 event became shocking with retrospective effect when David Miller and Pavel Tichy independently proved that a false theory, that is a theory with at least one false consequence, could according to Popper's definition never be closer to the truth than another one. With this proof they demolished the definition, for it could not do justice to the presupposed nature of most of the culminating-points in the history of science: new theories, such as Einstein's theory, though presumably false, are more successful than their predecessors, such as Newton's theory, just because they are closer to the truth, that is, closer to the unknown true theory about the subject matter. Introduction ......Page 7 PART I: Four approaches to truthlikeness ......Page 15 Ilkka Niiniluoto: How to define verisimilitude ......Page 17 Graham Oddie: The picture theory of truthlikeness ......Page 31 Gerhard Schurz & Paul Weingartner: Verisimilitude defined by relevant consequence-elements ......Page 53 Theo Kuipers: A structuralist approach to truthlikeness ......Page 85 PART II: Eight aspects of truthlikeness ......Page 107 Johan van Benthem: Verisimilitude and conditionals ......Page 109 Jonathan Cohen: Verisimilitude and legisimilitude ......Page 135 Roberto Festa: Theory of similarity, similarity of theories, and verisimilitude ......Page 151 Theo Kuipers: Truthlikeness of stratified theories ......Page 183 Ilkka Niiniluoto: Verisimilitude with indefinite truth ......Page 193 Graham Oddie: Truthlikeness and the convexity of propositions ......Page 203 Gerard de Vries: Explaining 'truth' in a relativist way ......Page 223 Henk Zandvoort: Verisimilitude and novel facts ......Page 235 About the authors ......Page 259 New books published by Rodopi ......Page 261 I formulate in this paper a general definition of verisimilitude, applicable to a wide range of special cases. Edited By Theo A.f. Kuipers. Includes Bibliographies.