Resumo

AGASSI, Joseph. Verisimilitude. discus.filos [online]. 2011, vol.12, n.19, pp.61-86. ISSN 0124-6127.

The idea of verisimilitude is implicit in the writings of Albert Einstein ever since 1905. The news has reached the philosophical community via the writings of Sir Karl Popper half-a-century after Einstein's trailblazing conception. As the theory of verisimilitude is inherently pro-metaphysics, there are two possible readings of Popper's view of verisimilitude. I think the criticisms that it has met are due to his vagueness on this matter and to the obvious shortcomings of the halfway admission of metaphysics into science. Though verisimilitude is a relative newcomer to the modern physics, it already has a rich literature, including the book Truthlikeness of Ilkka Niiniluoto, the most energetic advocate of the topic. The present article is not a review of it, as the mere discussion of its enormous, heavy logical mathematical apparatus requires more space than is available to me. I will, however, say that his book has proven to be a philosophical landmark -for better and for worse- and I will try to present the general, most philosophical aspects of the situation. I should say here that I am not going to suppress my bias but rather contrast it with his. Briefly, I think that his position is halfway pro-metaphysical whereas mine is fully pro-metaphysical. Whatever advances the theory of verisimilitude has made since, the disagreement here outlined is not ephemeral, and my view has led me to a specific view of verisimilitude that is at odds with almost all that has been written after Niiniluoto's mentioned book of 1987.

Palavras-chave : Critical realism; metaphysics; Niiniluoto; pro-metaphysical; Popper; verisimilitude.

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