(March 24, 2015 at 5:14 am)Alex K Wrote: As a physicist, this sounds too simplistic to me. No good physicist would say: Theory XY is true. That's just not part of the vocabulary...
To give you a tired standard example: Newtonian theory vs. Special relativity. Newton was once the best theory, but obviously never yields 100% precise results. We know relativity and can roughly quantify the error. The same is true for relativity.
How does this situation fit in your scheme of things?
When I speak of the "truth" of a scientific theory, what I really mean is the approximate truth. I think it's important to maintain a certain level of modesty since we don't know everything.
What do I mean by "approximate"? Simply that if T is the set of all true claims about the world, then a theory B will be approximately more true than A if (i) B implies more of the claims in T than does A and (ii) B implies fewer of the claims that are not in T than does A.
I still think the question remains of why it is that science is successful, and if we can give a meaningful explanation.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it" ~ Aristotle
