Abstract
When Karl Popper’s attempt to define verisimilitude or truthlikeness failed, some of his followers suggested that critical rationalists do not really need this notion. Some others took up the challenge of rescuing Popper’s definition or finding a better one. I first met Joseph Agassi at this intellectual crossroad in 1974. We share a sense of the importance of the problem of verisimilitude, but we approach it from different backgrounds: Agassi from the LSE anti-inductivism, I from my education with Jaakko Hintikka’s inductive logic, so that we disagree on some issues about the why and the how of this problem. This paper gives me an opportunity to respond to some interesting comments and critical reviews by Agassi on my books Truthlikeness (1987) and Critical Scientific Realism (1999).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Agassi, Joseph. 1975. Verisimilitude: Comments on David Miller. Synthese 30: 197–204.
———. 1976. Verisimilitude: Popper, Miller, and Hattiangadi. In Formal methods in the methodology of empirical sciences, ed. M. Przelecki, K. Szaniawski, and R. Wojcicki, 335–352. Wroclaw/Dordrecht: Ossolineum/D. Reidel.
———. 1981. To save Verisimilitude. Mind 90: 576–579.
———. 2001. The complete critical realist – Review of Ilkka Niiniluoto. Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 50: 77–84.
———. 2011. Verisimilitude. Discusiones Filosóficas 12: 61–86.
Cevolani, Gustavo. 2016. Carnapian truthlikeness. Logic Journal of the IGPL 24: 542–556. (advance access).
Hattiangadi, Jagdish. 1975. After verisimilitude. In Contributed papers, 5th international congress of logic, methodology and philosophy of science, 49–50. London, Ontario.
———. 1983. To save fallibilism. Mind 92: 407–409.
Jeffrey, Richard. 1975. Probability and falsification: Critique of the Popper program. Synthese 30: 95–117.
Kuipers, Theo. 2000. From instrumentalism to constructive realism: On some relations between confirmation, empirical progress, and truth approximation. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Miller, David. 1974. Popper’s qualitative theory of verisimilitude. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 25: 166–177.
———. 1975. The accuracy of predictions: A reply. Synthese 30: 207–219.
Niiniluoto, Ilkka. 1977. On the truthlikeness of generalizations. In Basic problems in methodology and linguistics, ed. R.E. Butts and K.J. Hintikka, 121–147. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
———. 1986. The significance of verisimilitude. In PSA 1984, ed. P.D. Asquith and P. Kitcher, vol. 2, 591–613. East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Association.
———. 1987. Truthlikeness. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
———. 1998. Verisimilitude: The third period. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49: 1–29.
———. 1999. Critical scientific realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2011. The development of the Hintikka program. In Handbook of the history of logic, vol. 10: Inductive logic, ed. D.M. Gabbay, S. Hartmann, and J. Woods, 311–356. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Niiniluoto, Ilkka, and Raimo Tuomela. 1973. Theoretical concepts and hypothetico-inductive inference. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
Oddie, Graham. 1986. Likeness to truth. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
———. 2014. Truthlikeness. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, ed. E. Zalta. Stanford: Metaphysics Research Lab, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University.
Popper, Karl R. 1963. Conjectures and refutations: The growth of scientific knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
———. 1979. Objective knowledge. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 1982. Realism and the aim of science. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Niiniluoto, I. (2017). Verisimilitude: Why and How. In: Bar-Am, N., Gattei, S. (eds) Encouraging Openness. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 325. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57669-5_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57669-5_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-57668-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-57669-5
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)