Reputability and approval, however, are not necessarily indicators of truth, and therefore the role that endoxa played for Aristotle and for the scholastics needs clarification.
For instance, one might think that people's moral intuitions vary too much to be reliable indicators of truth, or that in morality emotions can distort our intuitions.
In assessing a criteriological argument, we need to ask not only whether the event in question meets the criteria but also whether the criteria themselves are good indicators of truth.
A proposition was probable (probabilis) if specific indicators of truth justified assent (i.e., holding it true) or acceptance as a premise for action.[4] The main justifications for judgments of probability will be discussed in more detail in Section 3, on "Scholastic Concepts of Probability".
In other words, S's reasons the way an object appears to S, for example—are a reliable indicator of the truth of P.
If all that matters for testimonial justification is that the speaker be a reliable indicator of the truth, the fact that she is inviting us to trust her should be epistemically superfluous.
In both instances, they want to know why the features of the hypotheses to which realists draw attention the ability of those hypotheses to generate correct conclusions about observable matters—should be taken as indicators of the truth of the hypotheses.
They do not have special value as indicators of the truth of what the theories say about the unobservable parts of the world.
By analogy, using the success of a scientific theory as an indicator of its approximate truth (assuming a low rate of false positives cases in which theories far from the truth are nonetheless successful) is arguably, likewise, an instance of the base rate fallacy.
The scientific realist may continue this line of thought by arguing that all measures of empirical success in fact are at best indicators of real cognitive progress, measured in terms of truth or truthlikeness.
