Science and Partial Truth: A Unitary Approach to Models and Scientific Reasoning

by Newton C.A. da Costa, Steven French

In the past thirty years, two fundamental issues have emerged in the philosophy of science. One concerns the appropriate attitude we should take towards scientific theories--whether we should regard them as true or merely empirically adequate, for example. The other concerns the nature of scientific theories and models and how these might best be represented.
In this ambitious book, da Costa and French bring these two issues together by arguing that theories and models should be regarded as partially rather than wholly true. They adopt a framework that sheds new light on issues to do with belief, theory acceptance, and the realism-antirealism debate. The new machinery of "partial structures" that they develop offers a new perspective from which to view the nature of scientific models and their heuristic development. Their conclusions will be of wide interest to philosophers and historians of science.

Genres: Logic

272 pages, Hardcover

First published September 18, 2003

About the author

Newton Carneiro Affonso da Costa (born 16 September 1929 in Curitiba, Brazil) is a Brazilian mathematician, logician, and philosopher. He studied engineering and mathematics at the Federal University of Paraná in Curitiba and the title of his 1961 Ph.D. dissertation was Topological spaces and continuous functions.

Reviews

[Joshua Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Science and Partial Truth is an interesting read, but ultimately not satisfying in the ways I hoped after reading the introduction and first few chapters. The book engages well in expounding the principle virtues of various unitary approaches advanced elsewhere in the literature, and they offer a good and interesting perspective on those views, but they don't successfully put together their positive project in a way that is satisfying.

There are some interesting kernels. Partial truth as a mode of assessment of scientific theories contra van Fraassen's notion of empirical adequacy; but the formal definition of partial truth that they give doesn't clearly fit into theories in a way that is intuitive, and the ways where it does fit in (around models and isomorphism) seem clunky. The use of paraconsistent logics is a very cool approach, and probably the major engaging contribution of the book, but the payoff never comes; we never really get to see the model of logic that da Costa and French propose.

I'm sure that there are some interesting papers that could follow up this book that give shape and depth to the book, but the contents of the book don't serve as a really good window into the account that da Costa and French seem to have in mind and, given how short the book is, it is hard to see why that should be.

Also, the book is heavily technical, taking a lot of time to present and carefully pull through the literature in metaphysics and philosophy of science that is of interest. This makes for a really good exegesis of Tarski and van Fraassen and other folks in philosophy of science who are difficult to read, but feels a little gratuitous and seems to distract from the substance of the work that da Costa and French want to do. They wind up giving formal characterization of background ideas instead of bringing their own (very interesting) ideas to the forefront and taking time to flesh them out. If da Costa and French were to put out a follow up book, I'm sure it would be terrific, as they've gotten the background material well squared away, at this point.