PhilSci Archive

Overlapping Scientific Consensus theory: extending quasi-truth for scientific knowledge in historical sciences

Costa, Vitor and Arenhart, Jonas (2025) Overlapping Scientific Consensus theory: extending quasi-truth for scientific knowledge in historical sciences. [Preprint]

This is the latest version of this item.

[img] Text
Overlapping Scientific Consensus theory.docx

Download (51kB)
[img] Text
Overlapping Scientific Consensus theory.pdf

Download (555kB)

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.


Export/Citation: EndNote | BibTeX | Dublin Core | ASCII/Text Citation (Chicago) | HTML Citation | OpenURL
Social Networking:
Share |

Item Type: Preprint
Creators:
CreatorsEmailORCID
Costa, Vitorvitor.m.costa@outlook.com0000-0002-8719-4025
Arenhart, Jonasjonas.becker2@gmail.com0000-0001-8570-7336
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

Available Versions of this Item

  • Overlapping Scientific Consensus theory: extending quasi-truth for scientific knowledge in historical sciences. (deposited 09 Jul 2025 13:16) [Currently Displayed]

Monthly Views for the past 3 years

Monthly Downloads for the past 3 years

Plum Analytics

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item