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Papers by Julia SÁNCHEZ–DORADO
Knuuttila, T., N. Carrillo, and R. Koskinen (forth.) Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Scientific Modeling. https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Philosophy-of-Scientific-Modeling/Knuuttila-Carrillo-Koskinen/p/book/9781032071510, 2023
The problem of representation has become a central topic of debate in contemporary philosophy of ... more The problem of representation has become a central topic of debate in contemporary philosophy of science. Scientific models function as ‘vehicles’ that represent certain ‘target systems’ in the world, such as the structure of DNA, the growth of carcinogenic cells, the meandering formations of a river, or the propagation of a virus, helping scientists gain new insight about them. Finding a satisfactory answer to the question “how do models represent natural and social phenomena?” has proved elusive. This is partly because this question entails several different epistemological interrogations that are not always clearly separated from one another, and partly because the diversity of models in science poses a challenge to those attempting to find unifying, all-encompassing theories of scientific representation. This chapter introduces the main questions at stake when philosophers address the so-called “problem of scientific representation”, and sketches some prevalent ways of dealing with them in the contemporary literature.
Ambrosio, C. and Sánchez-Dorado, J. (Eds.) (2024) Abstraction in Science and Art: Philosophical Persepctives. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Abstraction-in-Science-and-Art-Philosophical-Perspectives/Ambrosio-Sanchez-Dorado/p/book/9781032462875# , 2024
It is a common claim in the modelling literature in philosophy of science that abstracting is the... more It is a common claim in the modelling literature in philosophy of science that abstracting is the act of omitting some aspects of a natural system that are deemed irrelevant. Although this conception of abstraction rightly points to the need that modellers have to leave out unnecessary details and isolate relevant features of the target investigated, it overlooks a fundamental creative component of abstraction that cannot be explained in terms of omission. Looking at modern theories of abstract art, in particular those traceable in the educational program of the Bauhaus at Weimar and Dessau (1919-1933), can provide insight about the cognitive potential of abstraction beyond omission: abstractions can prompt the spatial imagination of the viewers, leading to the appreciation of previously unnoticed, insightful relations between the various aspects constituting an object or event in the world. A case in scientific research is introduced to illustrate how acts of abstracting in modelling practices can have a similar cognitive potential than in artistic creation. Namely, investigations in fluid dynamics carried out by Ludwig Prandtl and Friedrich Ahlborn, also in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century, were fundamentally supported on the creation of visual abstract spaces, where interacting lines and planes triggered the spatial imagination of the viewers, leading to a novel understanding of the behaviour of fluids.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2023
This paper revisits the standard definition of scientific creativity in the contemporary philosop... more This paper revisits the standard definition of scientific creativity in the contemporary philosophical literature. The standard definition of creativity says that there are two necessary, and jointly sufficient, conditions for creativity, novelty and value. This paper proposes to characterize the value condition of creativity in terms of “pursuitworthiness”. The notion of pursuitworthiness, adopted from the debate on scientific pursuit in philosophy of science, refers to a form of prospective epistemic worth. It indicates that a certain object (such as a scientific hypothesis) is promising or has the potential to be epistemically fertile in the future, if further investigated. To support the claim that creative scientific instances are, qua creative, valuable in the sense of pursuitworthy, three examples of creative hypotheses taken from the modern history of the geosciences are introduced: MacCulloch’s continuity hypothesis in mid- 19th-century geology, Baron et al.’s phylogenetic hypothesis in contemporary paleontology, and the widely discussed Anthropocene hypothesis.
The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2021
The publication of The Aesthetics of Science invites to reflect, beyond the range of individual a... more The publication of The Aesthetics of Science invites to reflect, beyond the range of individual arguments advanced in it, on the general aims that motivate the production of an edited volume like this. There seems to be a spectrum of possible commitments when one addresses the role of aesthetic values in science...
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2021
"Colligation", a term first introduced in philosophy of science by William Whewell (1840), today ... more "Colligation", a term first introduced in philosophy of science by William Whewell (1840), today sparks a renewed interest beyond Whewell scholarship. In this paper, we argue that adopting the notion of colligation in current debates in philosophy of science can contribute to our understanding of scientific models. Specifically, studying colligation allows us to have a better grasp of how integrating diverse model components (empirical data, theory, useful idealization, visual and other representational resources) in a creative way may produce novel generalizations about the phenomenon investigated. Our argument is built both on the theoretical appraisal of Whewell's philosophy of science and the historical rehabilitation of his scientific work on tides. Adopting a philosophy of science in practice perspective, we show how colligation emerged from Whewell's empirical work on tides. The production of idealized maps ("cotidal maps") illustrates the unifying and creative power of the activity of colligating in scientific practice. We show the importance of colligation in modelling practices more generally by looking at its epistemic role in the construction of the San Francisco Bay Model.
European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 2020
The standard view in current philosophy of creativity says that being creative has two requiremen... more The standard view in current philosophy of creativity says that being creative has two requirements: being novel and being valuable (to which a third intentionality requirement is often added; Sternberg and Lubart 1999; Boden 2004; Gaut 2010). This standard view on creativity has recently become an object of critical scrutiny. Bird and Hills (2018) have specifically proposed to remove the value requirement from the definition, as it is not clear that creative objects are necessarily valuable and creative people necessarily praiseworthy. In this paper, I argue against Bird and Hills (2018), since eliminating the element of value from the explanation of creativity hinders the understanding of the role that actual creative objects and ideas play in epistemic practices, which are fundamentally normative. More specifically, I argue that the terms ‘creativity’ and ‘creative’ function as thick epistemic concepts when employed by competent epistemic agents in practice, that is, these concepts have both a descriptive and an evaluative content that cannot be disentangled from one another. Accordingly, I suggest that philosophers should prefer thick accounts over thin accounts of creativity. A thick account of creativity is one that endorses the standard view at its basis, but further develops it in two ways: by stressing the entanglement of the value and novelty requirements; by permitting to encompass a range of domain-specific characterizations of such entanglement for different epistemic situations. In order to take the first step in the development of such a thick account, I look at the domain of scientific practice as a case in point, and try to spell out what the thickness (or entanglement of novelty and worth) of creative instances typically entails here. Namely, I identify the worthy novelty of creative models and methods with their potential to clarify a tradition, with fruitfulness, and with the fulfilment of exploratory aims.
Thesis Chapters by Julia SÁNCHEZ–DORADO
UCL PhD Thesis, 2019
The thesis proposes an account of the means of scientific representation focused on similarity, o... more The thesis proposes an account of the means of scientific representation focused on similarity, or more specifically, on the notion of “creative similarity”. I first distinguish between two different questions regarding the problem of representation: the question about the constituents and the question about the means of representation (following Suárez 2003; van Fraassen 2008). I argue that, although similarity is not a good candidate for constituent of representation, it can satisfactorily answer the question about the means of representation if adequately characterized. To motivate this position, I dispute the main arguments offered against similarity as means of representation, namely the arguments from variety, vagueness, and misrepresentation, and contend that similarity plays a central epistemic role in practices of representing in science. The study of the role of similarity in scientific practice, I argue, requires the analysis of the uses of judgments of similarity in the construction of scientific models. I examine the cases of the Mississippi Basin Model and the San Francisco Bay Model to illustrate how judgments of similarity are directly involved in the production of epistemically fruitful models. Informed by the practical investigation developed throughout the thesis, I finally outline what I call the creative similarity account of the means of representation. The notion of “creative similarity” helps to capture the way in which similarity, as means of representation, intervenes in actual practices of representing, namely, in the form of a productive interplay of judgments of similarity and distortions (i.e. idealizations, abstractions, simplifications), which is employed by resourceful agents with the aim of understanding aspects of the natural world.
Knuuttila, T., N. Carrillo, and R. Koskinen (forth.) Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Scientific Modeling. https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Philosophy-of-Scientific-Modeling/Knuuttila-Carrillo-Koskinen/p/book/9781032071510, 2023
The problem of representation has become a central topic of debate in contemporary philosophy of ... more The problem of representation has become a central topic of debate in contemporary philosophy of science. Scientific models function as ‘vehicles’ that represent certain ‘target systems’ in the world, such as the structure of DNA, the growth of carcinogenic cells, the meandering formations of a river, or the propagation of a virus, helping scientists gain new insight about them. Finding a satisfactory answer to the question “how do models represent natural and social phenomena?” has proved elusive. This is partly because this question entails several different epistemological interrogations that are not always clearly separated from one another, and partly because the diversity of models in science poses a challenge to those attempting to find unifying, all-encompassing theories of scientific representation. This chapter introduces the main questions at stake when philosophers address the so-called “problem of scientific representation”, and sketches some prevalent ways of dealing with them in the contemporary literature.
Ambrosio, C. and Sánchez-Dorado, J. (Eds.) (2024) Abstraction in Science and Art: Philosophical Persepctives. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Abstraction-in-Science-and-Art-Philosophical-Perspectives/Ambrosio-Sanchez-Dorado/p/book/9781032462875# , 2024
It is a common claim in the modelling literature in philosophy of science that abstracting is the... more It is a common claim in the modelling literature in philosophy of science that abstracting is the act of omitting some aspects of a natural system that are deemed irrelevant. Although this conception of abstraction rightly points to the need that modellers have to leave out unnecessary details and isolate relevant features of the target investigated, it overlooks a fundamental creative component of abstraction that cannot be explained in terms of omission. Looking at modern theories of abstract art, in particular those traceable in the educational program of the Bauhaus at Weimar and Dessau (1919-1933), can provide insight about the cognitive potential of abstraction beyond omission: abstractions can prompt the spatial imagination of the viewers, leading to the appreciation of previously unnoticed, insightful relations between the various aspects constituting an object or event in the world. A case in scientific research is introduced to illustrate how acts of abstracting in modelling practices can have a similar cognitive potential than in artistic creation. Namely, investigations in fluid dynamics carried out by Ludwig Prandtl and Friedrich Ahlborn, also in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century, were fundamentally supported on the creation of visual abstract spaces, where interacting lines and planes triggered the spatial imagination of the viewers, leading to a novel understanding of the behaviour of fluids.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2023
This paper revisits the standard definition of scientific creativity in the contemporary philosop... more This paper revisits the standard definition of scientific creativity in the contemporary philosophical literature. The standard definition of creativity says that there are two necessary, and jointly sufficient, conditions for creativity, novelty and value. This paper proposes to characterize the value condition of creativity in terms of “pursuitworthiness”. The notion of pursuitworthiness, adopted from the debate on scientific pursuit in philosophy of science, refers to a form of prospective epistemic worth. It indicates that a certain object (such as a scientific hypothesis) is promising or has the potential to be epistemically fertile in the future, if further investigated. To support the claim that creative scientific instances are, qua creative, valuable in the sense of pursuitworthy, three examples of creative hypotheses taken from the modern history of the geosciences are introduced: MacCulloch’s continuity hypothesis in mid- 19th-century geology, Baron et al.’s phylogenetic hypothesis in contemporary paleontology, and the widely discussed Anthropocene hypothesis.
The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2021
The publication of The Aesthetics of Science invites to reflect, beyond the range of individual a... more The publication of The Aesthetics of Science invites to reflect, beyond the range of individual arguments advanced in it, on the general aims that motivate the production of an edited volume like this. There seems to be a spectrum of possible commitments when one addresses the role of aesthetic values in science...
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2021
"Colligation", a term first introduced in philosophy of science by William Whewell (1840), today ... more "Colligation", a term first introduced in philosophy of science by William Whewell (1840), today sparks a renewed interest beyond Whewell scholarship. In this paper, we argue that adopting the notion of colligation in current debates in philosophy of science can contribute to our understanding of scientific models. Specifically, studying colligation allows us to have a better grasp of how integrating diverse model components (empirical data, theory, useful idealization, visual and other representational resources) in a creative way may produce novel generalizations about the phenomenon investigated. Our argument is built both on the theoretical appraisal of Whewell's philosophy of science and the historical rehabilitation of his scientific work on tides. Adopting a philosophy of science in practice perspective, we show how colligation emerged from Whewell's empirical work on tides. The production of idealized maps ("cotidal maps") illustrates the unifying and creative power of the activity of colligating in scientific practice. We show the importance of colligation in modelling practices more generally by looking at its epistemic role in the construction of the San Francisco Bay Model.
European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 2020
The standard view in current philosophy of creativity says that being creative has two requiremen... more The standard view in current philosophy of creativity says that being creative has two requirements: being novel and being valuable (to which a third intentionality requirement is often added; Sternberg and Lubart 1999; Boden 2004; Gaut 2010). This standard view on creativity has recently become an object of critical scrutiny. Bird and Hills (2018) have specifically proposed to remove the value requirement from the definition, as it is not clear that creative objects are necessarily valuable and creative people necessarily praiseworthy. In this paper, I argue against Bird and Hills (2018), since eliminating the element of value from the explanation of creativity hinders the understanding of the role that actual creative objects and ideas play in epistemic practices, which are fundamentally normative. More specifically, I argue that the terms ‘creativity’ and ‘creative’ function as thick epistemic concepts when employed by competent epistemic agents in practice, that is, these concepts have both a descriptive and an evaluative content that cannot be disentangled from one another. Accordingly, I suggest that philosophers should prefer thick accounts over thin accounts of creativity. A thick account of creativity is one that endorses the standard view at its basis, but further develops it in two ways: by stressing the entanglement of the value and novelty requirements; by permitting to encompass a range of domain-specific characterizations of such entanglement for different epistemic situations. In order to take the first step in the development of such a thick account, I look at the domain of scientific practice as a case in point, and try to spell out what the thickness (or entanglement of novelty and worth) of creative instances typically entails here. Namely, I identify the worthy novelty of creative models and methods with their potential to clarify a tradition, with fruitfulness, and with the fulfilment of exploratory aims.
UCL PhD Thesis, 2019
The thesis proposes an account of the means of scientific representation focused on similarity, o... more The thesis proposes an account of the means of scientific representation focused on similarity, or more specifically, on the notion of “creative similarity”. I first distinguish between two different questions regarding the problem of representation: the question about the constituents and the question about the means of representation (following Suárez 2003; van Fraassen 2008). I argue that, although similarity is not a good candidate for constituent of representation, it can satisfactorily answer the question about the means of representation if adequately characterized. To motivate this position, I dispute the main arguments offered against similarity as means of representation, namely the arguments from variety, vagueness, and misrepresentation, and contend that similarity plays a central epistemic role in practices of representing in science. The study of the role of similarity in scientific practice, I argue, requires the analysis of the uses of judgments of similarity in the construction of scientific models. I examine the cases of the Mississippi Basin Model and the San Francisco Bay Model to illustrate how judgments of similarity are directly involved in the production of epistemically fruitful models. Informed by the practical investigation developed throughout the thesis, I finally outline what I call the creative similarity account of the means of representation. The notion of “creative similarity” helps to capture the way in which similarity, as means of representation, intervenes in actual practices of representing, namely, in the form of a productive interplay of judgments of similarity and distortions (i.e. idealizations, abstractions, simplifications), which is employed by resourceful agents with the aim of understanding aspects of the natural world.