Adao, John Ver T.

ABM 11 D

January 16, 2017

Reading and Writing

Verisimilitude
Verisimilitude means being believable, or having the appearance of being true. You can
improve your play by using the sounds and smells of the beach as well as lots of sand to
create verisimilitude. Verisimilitude comes from the Latin verisimilitudo "likeness to truth" and is
used to describe stories. Verisimilitude has its roots in both the Platonic and Aristotelian dramatic
theory of mimesis (the imitation or representation of nature). For a piece of art to hold
significance or persuasion for an audience, according to Plato and Aristotle, it must have
grounding in reality.
In the nineteenth century, verisimilitude became one of the most important characteristics
of the realist novel, along with omniscient narration and psychological character development.
Many critics have argued that novelists of that period felt an obligation to understand the ongoing
transformation of their social order from a feudal to a capitalism economy by assuming
complete control over the worlds they created. Nineteenth-century novels also achieved
verisimilitude by including real historical events alongside fictional characters.
Verisimilitude is the extent to which the literary text is believable, or the extent to which it
imitates life. Even when stories are far-fetched, such as with science fiction, readers must be
willing to "suspend disbelief" and think that the story could actually occur. When someone says
that a literary work has verisimilitude that means it is believable to the audience because it reflects
real life experience. This idea of art mirroring life has been around for centuries, originating in the
ancient Greek concept of mimesis.
Truth is widely held to be the constitutive aim of inquiry. Even those who think the aim of
inquiry is something more accessible than the truth, as well as those who think the aim is
something more robust than possessing truth still affirm truth as a necessary component of the end
of inquiry. And, other things being equal, it seems better to end an inquiry by endorsing truths
rather than falsehoods. . Some falsehoods seem to realize the aim of getting at the truth better than
others. Some truths better realize the aim than other truths. And perhaps some falsehoods even
realize the aim better than some truths do.
The aim of the theory of verisimilitude is to answer the semantical question of what is
intended when we say that one theory is closer to the truth than another. It is not intended to
answer the epistemological question of how we can know that a theory is closer to the truth than
another. Thus a central problem for a theory of verisimilitude is to define the concept of
verisimilitude in such a way that a critical discussion of conjectures about relative degrees of
verisimilitude is possible.