What Shall we do With Verisimilitude?

Abstract

Popper distinguishes the problems of theoretical and pragmatic preference between rival theories, but he claims that there is a common non-inductive solution to both of them, viz. the “best-tested theory”, or the theory with the highest degree of corroboration. He further suggests that the degrees of corroboration serve as indicators of verisimilitude. One may therefore raise the question whether the recent theory of verisimilitude gives a general non-inductive solution to the problem of theoretical preference. This paper argues that this is not the case: the theory of verisimilitude is applicable to this problem if and only if there is an independent solution to the problem of induction. Moreover, the solutions to the theoretical and pragmatic problems of preference coincide only in some special cases.

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