Truthlikeness for probabilistic laws.

Truthlikeness is a property of a theory or a proposition that represents its closeness to the truth. We start by summarizing Niiniluoto's (Truthlikeness, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1987) proposal of truthlikeness for deterministic laws (DL), which defines truthlikeness as a function of accuracy, and García-...

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Publicado en:Synthese Vol. 199; no. 3/4; pp. 9359 - 9390
Autor principal: García-Lapeña, Alfonso
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Springer Nature Dec2021
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        10.1007/s11229-021-03206-4
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        atl: Truthlikeness for probabilistic laws.
      aug:
        au: García-Lapeña, Alfonso
        affil: LOGOS Research Group in Analytical Philosophy, Barcelona Institute of Analytical Philosophy (BIAP), University of Barcelona (UB), Barcelona, Spain
      su:
        Probability measures
        Probability theory
      sug:
        subj:
          Probability measures
          Probability theory
      keyword:
        Kullback–Leibler
        Legisimilitude
        Probabilistic laws
        Probabilistic truths
        Scientific laws
        Truthlikeness
        Verisimilitude
      ab: Truthlikeness is a property of a theory or a proposition that represents its closeness to the truth. We start by summarizing Niiniluoto's (Truthlikeness, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1987) proposal of truthlikeness for deterministic laws (DL), which defines truthlikeness as a function of accuracy, and García-Lapeña's (Br J Philos Sci, Forthcoming, 2021) expanded version, which defines truthlikeness for DL as a function of two factors, accuracy and nomicity. Then, we move to develop an appropriate definition of truthlikeness for probabilistic laws (PL) based on Niiniluoto's (Truthlikeness, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1987) suggestion to use the Kullback–Leibler divergence to define the distance between a probability law X and the true probability law T . We argue that the Kullback–Leibler divergence seems to be the best of the available probability distances to measure accuracy between PL. However, as in the case of DL, we argue that accuracy represents a necessary but not sufficient condition, as two PL may be equally accurate and still one may imply more true or truthlike consequences, behaviours or true facts about the system than the other. The final proposal defines truthlikeness for PL as a function of two factors, p-accuracy and p-nomicity, in intimate connexion with García-Lapeña's proposal for DL.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
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    language: English
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