Abstract
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 fully convincing. The aim of this paper is to analyze and understand the reasons of this dissatisfaction. Our thesis is that the dissatisfaction with the notion of truthlikeness concerns the double role that this notion plays within the similarity approach: This notion plays both a regulative role in the conception of theories and a constitutive one in their selection.
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Notes
Concerning the realist conception of progress, Niiniluoto points out that a realist does not need to affirm that “all actual steps of theory change in science have been and will be progressive”. A realist can accept that “some steps in the development of science have been regressive”. What characterizes the realist is that he believes that science is progressive on the whole (1999, p. 201).
The need for the introduction of ver(g/e) alongside Tr(g, h *) is clearly expressed by Niiniluoto in the following statement: “the realist needs a distinction between real and estimated success: the former is unknown, the latter is known and serves as an indicator of the former” (Niiniluoto 1999, p. 168).
For an extensive analysis of Kant’s distinction between constitutive and regulative principles see (Grier 2007).
In the terminology adopted by Niiniluoto, the role played by ver is called methodological (Niiniluoto 1999).
Barrett (2008) has recently provided an account of scientific progress that reverses the one provided within the similarity approach. Rather than defining what it is meant for a theory to be closer to truth than a rival one and then qualifying scientific progress as an evolution toward truth, he starts from the pragmatic assumption that science advances by eliminating errors and then, following Peirce (1877, 1878), he characterizes truth as a process of refinement of scientific theories via the elimination of error from our current best descriptions (Barrett 2008). Using our terminology, we could say that the elimination of errors plays in Barrett’s approach a constitutive role: a theory is selected on the basis of the pragmatic principle that specific errors of past theories have been eliminated from the new theory.
Niiniluoto (1999) has given the phlogiston theory as an historical example of a theory that is non-referring, but more truthlike than its predecessor. More precisely, Niiniluoto points out that this theory “made an improvement on earlier account of combustion by realizing that fire is not a substance (or element) but a process” (Niiniluoto 1999, p. 191).
Popper insisted that truthlikeness is a regulative notion and “not an epistemological or an epistemic” (Popper 1963, p. 234) one. Notwithstandingly, Niiniluoto (1987) ascribes to Popper the idea that empirical corroboration is a fallible indicator of truthlikeness and that, therefore, truthlikeness can legitimately play a role in theory selection. Yet, Popper clarified that the guide for preferring a theory to another one is its degree of corroboration, and that this “is not a measure of its verisimilitude” (Popper 1972, p. 103) but it simply indicates how its verisimilitude appears at a given moment in time. Popper compared the “status of truth in the objective sense […] to that of a mountain peak usually wrapped in clouds” (Popper 1963, p. 226): it is impossible for the climber to know whether he has reached the summit because, in the clouds, he would not be able to distinguish it from a subsidiary peak. The summit is there but the the climber can recognize its “objective existence” at best in the negative, that is, when he realizes that he failed to reach it, like for instance “when he is turned back by an overhanging wall” (Popper 1963, p. 226). Coherently with his falsificationist position, Popper concluded that “if we are lucky, we may discover the falsity of some of our theories” (Popper 1963, p. 226), at most.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and valuable suggestions. Mauro Birattari acknowledges support from the Belgian fund for scientific research F.S.R.–FNRS, of which he is a Research Associate.
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Piscopo, C., Birattari, M. A Critique of the Constitutive Role of Truthlikeness in the Similarity Approach. Erkenn 72, 379–386 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-010-9218-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-010-9218-2