Waclaw Kusnierczyk schrieb:
> Ingvar Johansson wrote:
>
>> I think what (reading vQ:s mail) might be
>> pedagogically missing in Peirce and Sowa is a concept advertised by
>> another fallibilist, Karl Popper. He verbalizes it using three different
>> expressions: ‘truthlikeness’, ‘verisimilitude’, and ‘approximation to
>> truth’. Theories are not just either true or false; truth can take
>> degrees. And very very much tells in favor of the view that most
>> empirically adequate theories have a rather high degree of truthlikeness.
>>
>
> > As long as you stick to the polar notion of truth-falsity, then you
> > have to say that all propositions that are not 'simply true' are
> > 'simply false'. And then you end up in the curious position that all
> > scientific theories - today, in the past, and for an immensely long
> > future to come - are simply false.
>
>
> Ingvar,
>
> I have, for curiosity rather than for stubbornness, read an article on
> truthlikeness from SEP:
>
> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truthlikeness/
>
> It appears to me that, according to that article, Popper's truthlikeness
> is, as you say, an approximation to truth. However, there is no word
> about degrees of truth, and indeed, every theory is either true or
> false. (Simply true or simply false, if you prefer.)
> (01)
In its very first paragraph, this article uses the expression 'degree of
truthlikeness', and I thought that I had managed to make it clear in our
discussion that my use of 'degrees of truth' means the same. With
respect to the term 'truth', excuse me, you look to me like a
hard-headed language purist. (02)
> Furthermore, it also seems that the Popper's definition of truthlikeness
> is far from problematic, and the subsequent extensions are also not void
> of problems. (03)
I agree with all this criticism. And I know for sure that in one of my
mails I mentioned, that I do not believe that it is possible to
construct a *formal measure of truthlikeness*, but that the notion is
nonethless useful - and necessary - as a regulative idea for research. (04)
> Depending on the definition, a false theory may be more
> truthlike than a true theory, and a true theory may be of truthlikeness
> lower than the maximal. And also, it seems to me that, with the
> syntactic definition of truth attributed to Popper in the referred
> article -- truth as as the set of all true sentences -- and the
> definition of truthlikeness as linearly corresponding to the proportion
> of truth captured by a theory, most scientific theories are in fact of
> rather low truthlikeness.
>
> Should 'theories are not just either true or false; truth can take
> degrees' be attributed to Popper, or is your own view?
>
> I am of course aware that the author of the SEP entry may have
> misinterpreted original works of Popper, simplified his words, as well
> as that an entry of this length can never accommodate for a full
> overview of a philosopher's opinion. (05)
In my opinion, the article (Graham Oddie, May 9, 2007) misses only
Popper's view that 'truth' and 'truthlikeness' are *regulative ideas* as
well. However, Oddie can defend himself by pointing out that in the
second paragraph he says that he "will examine the basic assumptions
which generate the *logical problem* of truthlikeness." In the reference
list he should have included chapter 7 of H. Keuth, "The Philosophy of
Karl Popper" (2004). Under the name of 'partial truth', the idea of
truthlikeness has also been advocated by Mario Bunge; this fact is not
mentioned either. (06)
best,
Ingvar (07)
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