On Competing Theories of Verisimilitude and on Evaluating Them

Abstract

In this chapter I shall give a review of the major forms of the theory of verisimilitude that have been developed by philosophers of science with the exception of structuralist approaches to this notion. I shall postpone the study of the relationship between the structuralist theory of science and the theory of verisimilitude to Chapters 5 and 6. However, before going into the details of the individual definitions that have been proposed, it seems to me appropriate to discuss on a more general level the criteria that are used in evaluating philosophical explications and, more specifically, in evaluating different explications of ‘closer to the truth’. A natural way to start doing this seems to be to quote two philosophers who have from their quite different perspectives emphasized the philosophical importance of explication as a method of clarifying the confusion created by the ambiguity and vagueness of ordinary-language expressions.