Ebook: What is Closer-to-the-Truth? A parade of approaches to truthlikeness

When Karl Popper published in 19631 his definition of closer-to-the-truth this was an important intellectual event, but not a shocking one. Everybody could react by saying that the definition was as it should be, and even that it could have been expected. For plausible the definition was indeed: a theory is closer to the truth than another one if the first has more true and less false consequences than the second.

About ten years later the 1963 event became shocking with retrospective effect when David Miller and Pavel Tichy independently proved that a false theory, that is a theory with at least one false consequence, could according to Popper's definition never be closer to the truth than another one.

With this proof they demolished the definition, for it could not do justice to the presupposed nature of most of the culminating-points in the history of science: new theories, such as Einstein's theory, though presumably false, are more successful than their predecessors, such as Newton's theory, just because they are closer to the truth, that is, closer to the unknown true theory about the subject matter.