2000/06/01 by P. Kyle Stanford · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Environmental Science · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Philosophy and History of Science #Science and Climate Studies #Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies
paper · doi:10.1086/392775
openalex publication_date 2000/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
I develop an account of predictive similarity that allows even Antirealists who accept a correspondence conception of truth to answer the Realist demand (recently given sophisticated reformulations by Musgrave and Leplin) to explain the success of particular scientific theories by appeal to some intrinsic feature of those theories (notwithstanding the failure of past efforts by van Fraassen, Fine, and Laudan). I conclude by arguing that we have no reason to find truth a better (i.e., more plausible) explanation of a theory's success than predictive similarity, even of its success in making novel predictions.