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
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Costa, Vitor vitor.m.costa@outlook.com 0000-0002-8719-4025 Arenhart, Jonas jonas.becker2@gmail.com 0000-0001-8570-7336
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
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
Date:	2025
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/25920

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