Abstract
The treatment of monadic generalizations, developed in Chapter 9, is extended here to first-order languages L with relations. First, the distance between polyadic constituents in L is defined in Section 1. Then it is shown how this definition — together with the theory of distributive normal forms — allows us to measure distances between complete theories in L (Section 2) and between L-structures (Section 3). These distance functions finally lead to a general definition of the degree of truthlikeness of first-order theories in language L (Section 4).
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Notes
For a similar argument, see Chapter 13.4.
Oddie (1979) makes the same point about his measure.
This view about possible worlds corresponds to ‘moderate modal realism’ (cf. Lewis, 1986).
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© 1987 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Niiniluoto, I. (1987). Polyadic Theories. In: Truthlikeness. Synthese Library, vol 185. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3739-0_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3739-0_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-8170-2
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-3739-0
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