Empirical Success, Closeness to Evidence, and Approximation to the Truth [Special Issue]
Issue: Issue 17 • Author/s: Gustavo Cevolani, Luca Tambolo
Topics: Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of language, Philosophy of science, Theoretical philosophy
Realists and antirealists agree that different theories can be more or less empirically successful, even if they disagree on how to interpret this fact. Most of their arguments rely on how the notion of success is understood; still, few definitions of success are available, and their adequacy is doubtful. In this paper, we discuss some of these definitions and introduce a new measure of the success of a theory relative to a body of evidence aimed at overcoming some of their limitations. We moreover discuss how empirical success is connected…