Verisimilitude: Syntactic Approaches vs. Semantic Approaches
Abstract
Verisimilitude, since Tichý and Miller’s critique on Popper’s definition, has posed great challenges to its definition in logical terms. Even if it is intuitive the idea that a false sense can be closer to the truth than another, it is highly problematic when it comes to describing it in logical terms. In order to provide an answer, realist philosophers has followed different strategies that can be classified in two large groups according to their approach: the syntactic and the smeanctic, each with successes and shortcomings of different kinds. In this paper, a description of both approaches will be given, paying special attention to the proposals of Popper and Schurz and Weingartner in the syntactic approach, and to Niiniluoto’s in the semantic approach.
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