Research On Karl Popper's Scientific Truth Theory Of "Verisimilitude"

Truth is a very important theory issue in the epistemology of philosophy. In the history of epistemology, different philosophers have different opinions about truth and its essence. In the western philosophy, there are four kinds of truth theories: the correspondence theory of truth, the coherence theory of truth, the redundancy theory of truth, the pragmatism theory of truth.Popper is a critical rationalist, and he is deeply affected by Tarski's truth theory. Popper did not know how to depict a statement according with fact until he knew Tarski's definition about truth. Popper introduced the conceptions of"verisimilitude"and"degree of verisimilitude", when he discussed the objection of scientific research. The property of closure to the truth, which is had by science theory, is named as"verisimilitude"by Popper. The degree of closing to truth of science theory is named as"degree of verisimilitude".The modern history of verisimilitude can be divided into three periods. The first began in 1960, when Karl Popper proposed his qualitative definition of what it is for one theory to be more truthlike than another theory, and lasted until 1974, when Divid Miler and Pavel Tichy published their refutation of Popper's definition. The second period started immediately with the attempt to explicate truthlikeness by means of relations of similarity or resemblance between states of affairs; the work within this similarity approach was summarized in the books of Graham Oddie [1986] and Ilkka Niinluoto [1987]. During the subsequent third period studies in verisimilitude have been achieved, but not many novelties.Popper's"verisimilitude"theory has been criticized by many scholars, Miller and David point out the fatal error of Popper's definition firstly, and other scholars also criticized Popper's definition. I will give various criticisms to Popper's theory in my article. I also point out five solutions to Popper's"verisimilitude"truth theory which are provided recently.