Scientific progress without increasing verisimilitude: In response to Niiniluoto.
نویسنده
چکیده
First, I argue that scientific progress is possible in the absence of increasing verisimilitude in science's theories. Second, I argue that increasing theoretical verisimilitude is not the central, or primary, dimension of scientific progress. Third, I defend my previous argument that unjustified changes in scientific belief may be progressive. Fourth, I illustrate how false beliefs can promote scientific progress in ways that cannot be explicated by appeal to verisimilitude.
منابع مشابه
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...
متن کاملCircling the Truth : Model Selection Criteria as a Metric of Verisimilitude in Theory Selection
The purpose of this research is to investigate the possibility of using aspects of model selection theory to overcome both a logical problem and an epistemic problem that prevents progress towards the truth to be measured while maintaining a realist approach to science. Karl Popper began such an investigation into the problem of progress in 1963 with an idea of verisimilitude, but his attempts ...
متن کاملVerisimilitude: 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...
متن کاملOn the Role of Correspondence in the Similarity Approach
The similarity approach stands as a significant attempt to defend scientific realism from the attack of the pessimistic meta-induction. The strategy behind the similarity approach is a shift from an absolute concept of truth to the more flexible notions of truthlikeness and approximate truth. The aim of this paper is to understand why the concepts of truthlikeness and approximate truth have bee...
متن کاملTruthlikeness, Rationality And Scientific Method
I. A. Kieseppä’s criticism of the methodological use of the theory of verisimilitude, and D. B. Resnik’s arguments against the explanation of scientific method by appeal to scientific aims are critically considered. Since the notion of verisimilitude was introduced as an attempt to show that science can be seen as a rational enterprise in the pursuit of truth, defenders of the verisimilitude pr...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
- Studies in history and philosophy of science
دوره 51 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2015