Abstract
In Sects. 4.4 and 4.5 we studied the notion of truth from a general point of view and derived certain applications to the domain of science. The issue of scientific truth, however, was not thematically addressed because, in those sections, we were essentially concerned with the characterisation of the truth of sentences while, when people deny truth in science, they often speak of the truth of theories. In subsequent sections we have seen that there is a legitimate sense in which one can also speak of the truth of theories, and this amounts to recognising that the concept of truth is analogical (more or less in the same sense that the concept of reality is analogical), so that it would be arbitrary to reject as spurious the very common use that leads us to speak of ‘true theories’ or ‘false theories’ (a use which sometimes gives rise even to the extreme claim that only whole theories and not single sentences may be said to be true or false). In addition, it seems natural to admit that, if truth is a property of single sentences, it might also apply to sets of sentences. This claim is straightforward if one such set is conceived to be the result of linking the single sentences of the set by means of logical operators, since in this case the result is again a sentence whose truth-value is determined by the truth-values of its components via the truth-functional definitions of the logical operators.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, the notion of “truth content” and of its measure is the tool Popper intends to be used for comparing two rival theories and establishing which is more “verisimilar” than the other (Popper 1972, pp. 47–53). In such a way the substantialist view of truth becomes very clear, since truth is gradually acquired along with the progress of theories. Though Popper often speaks of truth as a characteristic of propositions (adjectival sense), it is significant that he also stresses that truth must be understood as the class of all true statements: “If we speak about approach or approximation to truth, we mean ‘the whole truth’; that is, the whole class of true statements” (Popper 1972, p. 55).
- 2.
If Plato is the founder of this substantialistic conception of truth, of this promotion of truth to the level of an ontologically subsistent entity instead of a property of the discourse, many others have followed him along this path, and not only those who, more or less explicitly or clearly, adhere to a Platonist philosophy (for instance, because they locate the seat of truth in se in the mind of God). We also find philosophers outside this school who have followed this idea even in quite recent times. Let us only mention Hegel's conception of truth as being identical to the ‘totality,’ and being therefore something hidden which must be brought to consciousness by a dialectical process involving the self-clarification of the Idea. Or let us mention Heidegger, who conceives of truth as a deposit which exists and must be uncovered (up to the point that he invents the well-known alleged etymology of the Greek aletheia as meaning somehow a ‘dis-occultation’). But this conception is even wider, and finds expression in several branches of present day ‘hermeneutic’ philosophy, whose basic assumption is that our cognitive enterprise is in general a process of uncovering some self-subsistent concealed message that almost inevitably escapes our efforts to catch it completely or adequately.
- 3.
A brief but adequate account of this problematic may be found in Przelecki (1976).
- 4.
For a survey of the different meanings of “probability,” see Agazzi (1988c).
- 5.
This has always been clear in classical epistemology. In any textbook of scholastic epistemology (including modern ones), when the discussion regards the status of our intellectual acceptance of knowledge, certain standard steps are distinguished. We begin with ignorance, then we formulate certain conjectures and pass to a state of doubt, then, when we opt for one of such conjectures we pass to an opinion that we consider probable, and finally we may attain certainty (if we are lucky) when cogent reasons are established for the acceptance of our opinion. In contemporary analytic epistemology such traditional distinctions are often implicitly revisited, e.g., when knowledge is defined as ‘justified belief’.
- 6.
See Diemer (1964).
- 7.
This corresponds to the deep aim of science (including modern science) that remains undeniable even by those who are sceptical about its capaqbility of attaining it, an aim that is well espressed in the title of Psillos (1999), “How science traks truth”.
- 8.
Popper (1973), p. 44.
- 9.
This is implicitly recognised by Putnam, who says:
Whereas Dummett identifies truth with justification, I treat truth as an idealization of justification. Truth cannot simply be justification, I argue, for any number of reasons: truth is supposed to be a property of a statement that cannot be lost, whereas justification can be lost (in fact justification is both tensed and relative to a person), justification is a matter of degree, whereas truth is not (or not in the same way) etc. (Putnam 1983, p. 84).
Let us note, however, that it remains unclear how something that is not truth (i.e. justification) becomes identical with truth in the limit. It seems that a certain confusion between truth and certainty is implicit in Putnam’s position.
- 10.
See Cartwright (1983).
- 11.
As a matter of fact, the ‘scientific proofs’ of the rotation of the earth on its axis were obtained only in the nineteenth century, and those proposed by Galileo and Newton were not correct. In the meanwhile the Copernican theory was preferred because of several ‘gestaltic’ advantages of the type we have already discussed.
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Agazzi, E. (2014). Scientific Truth Revisited. In: Scientific Objectivity and Its Contexts. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04660-0_8
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