Abstract
The more said the better: so goes Popper’s methodological advice. This principle has filtered into much of the discussion on truthlikeness. The reason is that Popper himself, the first to give serious consideration to the problem, really had two aims in giving a rigorous account of truthlikeness. One was to capture the intuitive notion, and the other was to vindicate his falsificationist methodology of science. In trying to fulfil this latter aim he was led to espouse a principle which conflicted with the former. The principle involves the notion of content.
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References
Popper [1963], pp. 228–34.
Several of the ideas in this section are sketched in Oddie [1981], pp. 255–8.
That Popper endorsed the hard version of the content condition, as well as the soft, is obvious from his remarks on p. 396 of his [1963]. There he states that a perfectly adequate measure of truthlikeness would be CtT(A)-CtF(A). In the case of a true theory his other conditions entail that CtF(A) = 0, and that CtT(A) = Ct(A). Jointly these theses entail the hard version of the content condition.
Niiniluoto [1982], p. 292.
Popper [1963], pp. 397-8, with adjustments to suit notation used here.
Popper [1976], p. 148.
It is somewhat ironic that the notion of truthlikeness, while saving falsificationism from pessimism serves to undermine it in a different way. Falsified theories may well be very close to the truth, and so it may well be worth clinging to them.
Popper [1959], p. 128. ( See also other references to ‘atomic statement’ in the index of that work.) Also, Popper [ 1976 ], p. 155.
Chalmers [1973]. 10Hilpinen [1968], p. 88.
Hilpinen [1968], p. 88.
Hintikka and Pietarinen [1966].
See Hilpinen [1968], p. 92. This work is an excellent summary of the various accounts of epistemic utility.
ibid., p. 89 ff.
Niiniluoto [1977], p. 137.
Similar criticisms are made by Laudan [1977], and considered by Newton-Smith [1981], p. 183 ff.. Newton-Smith attempts to reply to the criticisms by giving an account of truthlikeness and then linking truthlikeness to empirically detectable features of a theory. However, Newton-Smith’s account of truthlikeness is defective. ( For details, see Oddie [ 1986 ]. Briefly, the definition suffers two major defects. Because the definition relies on the class of all consequences of a proposition it suffers defects similar to those which plague Popper’s first definitions. Secondly, when the classes of non-equivalent consequences of propositions to be compared are infinite the definition ranks them only relative to a particular ordering of the consequences. Since there is no ‘natural’ ordering, the definition collapses.
Miller [1975], p. 165.
Tichy mentioned this conjecture in his [1980]; see chapter 4, f.n. 22, above.
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© 1986 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Oddie, G. (1986). Truthlikeness, Content and Utility. In: Likeness to Truth. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 30. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4658-3_7
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