Abstract
My title, I must confess from the start, is something of a misnomer; at best, a halfhearted pun. It is not my intention today seriously to address the question of the impartiality or objectivity of truth, if only because it seems to me that little more need be said on this score. That truth in general is something that is beyond human decision, or human opinion (though not therefore something that is beyond human conjecture or human discovery), will be presumed in this paper to be a truth that is quite beyond any human desire to have it otherwise. (See, for example, Popper (1963), Chapter 10, and Popper (1972), (1979), Chapters 2 and 9; for a contrast see Goguen (1979).) Rather I wish to take up again the difficult, important, and at times depressing question of whether there can be any such animal as partial truth; whether in addition to truth and falsity themselves there are what might be called degrees of truth, or degrees of approximation to the truth; and if there are (or even if there are not), whether science has any need for such things. That is my topic — the partialness, or lack of it, of truth, not its partiality.
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Miller, D. (1984). Impartial Truth. In: Skala, H.J., Termini, S., Trillas, E. (eds) Aspects of Vagueness. Theory and Decision Library, vol 39. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6309-2_5
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