Approaching deterministic and probabilistic truth: an unified account

The basic problem of a theory of truth approximation is defining when a theory is “close to the truth” about some relevant domain. Existing accounts of truthlikeness or verisimilitude address this problem, but are usually limited to the problem of approaching a “deterministic” truth by means of deterministic theories.Ageneral theory of truth approximation, however, should arguably cover also cases where either the relevant theories, or “the truth”, or both, are “probabilistic” in nature. As a step forward in this direction, we first present a general characterization of both deterministic and probabilistic truth approximation; then, we introduce a new account of verisimilitude which provides a simple formal framework to deal with such issue in a unified way. The connections of our account with some other proposals in the literature are also briefly discussed.