Two kinds of empirical truth, and realism about idealized laws

Abstract

From the semantic point of view, empirical truth is the truth of sentences whose terms have empirical references. However, only some such references directly and without distortion relate to real-world phenomena, while others relate to them only through their idealizations. In the former case, we speak of descriptive truth, and in the latter, of approximate truth. This paper aims to clarify this distinction using a version of the semantic theory of truth, invoking the context of the realism/anti-realism debate about idealized laws. The paper consists of two parts. The first informally clarifies the details of the distinction and criticizes the widespread belief that idealized laws or the assumptions they involve, are falsehoods. The second sets out to a formal-semantic account in which the idealized laws are both referentially true (in the idealized model) and approximately true (of the target system’s structure).