Costa, Vitor and Arenhart, Jonas (2025) Overlapping Scientific Consensus theory: extending quasi-truth for scientific knowledge in historical sciences. [Preprint]
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Abstract
The theory of quasi-truth was developed by Newton da Costa and collaborators as a more realistic account of truth, encompassing the incompleteness and inconsistency of scientific knowledge. Intuitively, the idea is that truth is reached when consensus is established at the end of inquiry; until that is reached, we have something less than the whole truth, we have partial or quasi-truth. Formally, the view faces some challenges that have been recently addressed in the literature; they concern a mismatch between the offered formalism and the expected claims to be formalized. In this paper we use inspiration from quasi-truth theory to develop an account of consensus in science encompassing the notion of quasi-truth. We not only present the formal system capturing the idea of a scientific consensus, but also show how quasi-truth may be represented within it too. We compare the original quasi-truth approach to ours, and argue that the latter is able to face some of the difficulties that plagued the former.
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Item Type: | Preprint | |||||||||
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Keywords: | quasi-truth, historical sciences, consensus, historical announcement logic. | |||||||||
Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Historical Sciences General Issues > Models and Idealization General Issues > Social Epistemology of Science General Issues > Structure of Theories |
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Depositing User: | Dr. Vitor Costa | |||||||||
Date Deposited: | 09 Jul 2025 13:16 | |||||||||
Last Modified: | 09 Jul 2025 13:16 | |||||||||
Item ID: | 25920 | |||||||||
Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Historical Sciences General Issues > Models and Idealization General Issues > Social Epistemology of Science General Issues > Structure of Theories |
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Date: | 2025 | |||||||||
URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/25920 |
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- Overlapping Scientific Consensus theory: extending quasi-truth for scientific knowledge in historical sciences. (deposited 09 Jul 2025 13:16) [Currently Displayed]
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