Summary |
According to convergent scientific
realism, empirically successful scientific theories are approximately true,
with our contemporary theories being closer to the truth than their
predecessors in the same domain. Like most types of scientific realism,
convergent realism holds that theoretical terms of successful theories refer,
the theoretical claims of preceding theories are carried over to the new
theories, at least as limiting cases, and the new theories can explain the
empirical success of their predecessors. In order to explain how our theories
are getting closer to the truth, some have developed the notion of ‘approximate
truth’ as a quantifiable measure. Karl Popper’s notion of ‘verisimilitude’, for
instance, was introduced to compare theories by their true and false
consequences, although this account run into many technical difficulties, as
shown by Miller (1974), Tichy (1974) and others. Another way realists have
explicated the notion of approximate truth is by evoking the correspondence
principle that shows how a superseded theory can be taken as a limiting case of
its successor. According Post’s (1971) ‘general correspondence principle’,
contemporary scientific theories can explain the success of their predecessors
by ‘degenerating’ into them in the respective domain in which they were
empirically successful. |