truthlike

At times monstrous images are created, but the setting and the whole picture are so truthlike and filled with details so delicate, so unexpectedly, but so artistically consistent, that the dreamer, were he an artist like Pushkin or Turgenev even, could never have invented them in the waking state.

"Idealization is a deliberate falsity which never attempts to be more than truthlike. An Idealizational statement is a special type of counterfactual which has to do with what goes on at possible worlds given by antecedent of that statement.

[...] of drying up the Riuer, as Alban went to the place of his execution: then of making a well-spring in the top of the hill, and of the falling out of the eyes of him that did behead him (with such other prodigious miracles mentioned in his story) because they seem more legendlike than truthlike: agayne, because I see no great profit, nor necessitie in the relation thereof, I leaue them to the free iudgement of the Reader, to thinke of them, as cause shall moue him.

Robert Nozick suggests that philosophers will tend to prefer those arguments that leave room for hope; Laura Quinney makes the counterargument that our criteria for truth tend to be literary and that we will thus tend to count what is grimmest as most truthful or truthlike. In this she is following a remark of Wittgenstein's (whom she discusses at some length) on the attractiveness of Freudianism.

And even if it is not claimed to be identical with the relation holding between two theories, one of which is more truthlike than the other, it is meant to be very closely related to the comparative (as distinct from the classificatory and the quantitative) notion of verisimilitude.

And, for purposes of verisimilitude it is normally desirable that the truthlike claims made by a novel should consist not of new and surprising information, but of familiar commonplaces which any reader will know or could verify for himself.

Hausman counters that scientific claims are only falsifiable in the presence of background theories and a reasonable choice between background theories requires that an informed judgment can be made as to whether some background theory is more or less truthlike: falsification does not supersede verification as a criterion for theory choice but rather presupposes ft.

in choosing between rival scientific theories or in the design of a scientific system to support decision-making, a fundamental question in the philosophy of science comes to the fore: when is one theory closer to the truth (more truthlike, or having greater verisimilitude) than another theory?