ABSTRACT In a recent paper in this journal, entitled ‘Scientific Progress: Why Getting Closer to Truth is Not Enough’ (2017), Moti Mizrahi argues that the view of progress as approximation to the truth or increasing verisimilitude is plainly false. The key premise of his argument is that on such a view of progress, in order to get closer to the truth one only needs to arbitrarily add a true disjunct to a hypothesis or theory. Since quite clearly scientific progress is not a matter of adding true disjuncts to theories, the argument goes, the view of progress as approximation to the truth is untenable. We show that the key premise of Mizrahi’s argument is false: according to verisimilitude-based accounts of progress, adding arbitrary true disjuncts to existing theories is just not enough to get closer to the truth.

中文翻译：

---

为什么增加真理还不够：对Mizrahi的回应是对真理的近似

摘要在Moti Mizrahi在该杂志的最近一篇论文中，题为``科学进步：为什么越来越接近真相还不够''（2017年），他认为将进步视为接近真相或日益逼真的观点显然是错误的。他的论点的关键前提是，从这种进步的观点出发，为了更接近真相，只需要在假设或理论上任意添加一个真正的析取物即可。该论点认为，由于相当明显的科学进步并不是在理论上增加真正的脱节，因此，将进步视为与真理近似的观点是站不住脚的。我们证明，米兹拉希论点的关键前提是错误的：根据基于进步的对进步的描述，在现有理论中添加任意真实的分离仅不足以接近真理。