Verisimilitude

why and how

Ilkka Niiniluoto

pp. 71-79

in: Nimrod Bar Am, Stefano Gattei (eds), Encouraging openness, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Abstract

When Karl Popper's attempt to define verisimilitude or truthlikeness failed, some of his followers suggested that critical rationalists do not really need this notion. Some others took up the challenge of rescuing Popper's definition or finding a better one. I first met Joseph Agassi at this intellectual crossroad in 1974. We share a sense of the importance of the problem of verisimilitude, but we approach it from different backgrounds: Agassi from the LSE anti-inductivism, I from my education with Jaakko Hintikka's inductive logic, so that we disagree on some issues about the why and the how of this problem. This paper gives me an opportunity to respond to some interesting comments and critical reviews by Agassi on my books Truthlikeness (1987) and Critical Scientific Realism (1999).

Cited authors

Popper Karl

Hintikka Jaakko

Agassi Joseph