Truthlikeness, Rationality And Scientific Method

A Critique of the Constitutive Role of Truthlikeness 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 to shift from an absolute notion of truth to the more flexible one of truthlikeness. Nonetheless, some authors are not satisfied with this attempt to defend realism and find that the notion of truthlikeness is not ...

BELIEF REVISION AND TRUTHLIKENESS In December 1977, a conference on ÓThe Logic and Epistemology of Scientific ChangeÓ was

On 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...

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...

On Quantifying Semantic Information

The purpose of this paper is to look at some existing methods of semantic information quantification and suggest some alternatives. It begins with an outline of Bar-Hillel and Carnap’s theory of semantic information before going on to look at Floridi’s theory of strongly semantic information. The latter then serves to initiate an in-depth investigation into the idea of utilising the notion of t...