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In  Sects. 4.4 and  4.5 we studied the notion of truth from a general point of view and derived certain applications to the domain of science. The issue of scientific truth, however, was not thematically addressed because, in those sections, we were essentially concerned with the characterisation of the truth of sentences while, when people deny truth in science, they often speak of the truth of class="EmphasisTypeItalic ">theories. In subsequent sections we have seen that there is a legitimate sense in which one can also speak of the truth of theories, and this amounts to recognising that the concept of truth is analogical (more or less in the same sense that the concept of reality is analogical), so that it would be arbitrary to reject as spurious the very common use that leads us to speak of "true theories' or "false theories' (a use which sometimes gives rise even to the extreme claim that only whole theories and not single sentences may be said to be true or false). In addition, it seems natural to admit that, if truth is a property of single sentences, it might also apply to sets of sentences. This claim is straightforward if one such set is conceived to be the result of linking the single sentences of the set by means of logical operators, since in this case the result is again a sentence whose truth-value is determined by the truth-values of its components via the truth-functional definitions of the logical operators.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-04660-0_8

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