Computing Verisimilitude

Verisimilitude: a causal approach

I present a new definition of verisimilitude, framed in terms of causes. Roughly speaking, according to it a scientific model is approximately true if it captures accurately the strengths of the causes present in any given situation. Against much of the literature, I argue that any satisfactory account of verisimilitude must inevitably restrict its judgments to context-specific models rather th...

Verisimilitude and Likelihood

Belief Revision and Verisimilitude

Belief Revision and Verisimilitude Mark Ryan Department of Mathematics Instituto Superior T ecnico Av. Rovisco Pais 1096 Lisbon Codex Portugal [email protected] Pierre-Yves Schobbens Institut d'Informatique Fac. Univ. Notre-Dame de la Paix Rue Grandgagnage 21 5000 Namur Belgium [email protected] Abstract. The Egli-Milner power-ordering is used to de ne verisimilitude orderings on theories from pr...

An impossibility theorem for verisimilitude

In this paper, we show that Arrow’s well-known impossibility theorem is instrumental in bringing the ongoing discussion about verisimilitude to amore general level of abstraction. After some preparatory technical steps, we show that Arrow’s requirements for voting procedures in social choice are also natural desiderata for a general verisimilitude definition that places content and likeness con...

Scientific Progress, Verisimilitude, and Evidence

The verisimilitudinarian approach to scientific progress (VS) is the view that progress can be accounted for in terms of the increasing verisimilitude or, equivalently, truthlikeness, or approximation to the truth, of our theories. In this paper, I defend VS against the criticism, levelled by Bird (2007), that it exhibits an unacceptable lack of interest in the issue of the grounding of scienti...