Intentional Models as Essential Scientific Tools (original) (raw)

How to Do Science with Models: A Philosophical Primer

Taking scientific practice as its starting point, this book charts the complex territory of models used in science. It examines what scientific models are and what their function is. Reliance on models is pervasive in science, and scientists often need to construct models in order to explain or predict anything of interest at all. The diversity of kinds of models one finds in science – ranging from toy models and scale models to theoretical and mathematical models – has attracted attention not only from scientists, but also from philosophers, sociologists, and historians of science. This has given rise to a wide variety of case studies that look at the different uses to which models have been put in specific scientific contexts. By exploring current debates on the use and building of models via cutting-edge examples drawn from physics and biology, the book provides broad insight into the methodology of modelling in the natural sciences. It pairs specific arguments with introductory material relating to the ontology and the function of models, and provides some historical context to the debates as well as a sketch of general positions in the philosophy of scientific models in the process.

Modeling as a Case for the Empirical Philosophy of Science

In recent years, the emergence of a new trend in contemporary philosophy has been observed in the increasing usage of empirical research methods to conduct philosophical inquiries. Although philosophers primarily use secondary data from other disciplines or apply quantitative methods (experiments, surveys, etc.), the rise of qualitative methods (e.g., in-depth interviews, participant observations and qualitative text analysis) can also be observed. In this paper, I focus on how qualitative research methods can be applied within philosophy of science, namely within the philosophical debate on modeling. Specifically, I review my empirical investigations into the issues of model de-idealization, model justification and performativity.

A role of models in scientific explanation

2009

A role of models in scientific explanation and insufficiency of unification view of explanation are discussed. Model is constructed by abstracting some important elements from the real world. There are too many complicated interactions in the real world to calculate, but model makes calculations possible. However, that is only part of importance of model in scientific activity. At the first sight, we think that it is better for scientists to use models including more elements (it means the model is closer to the real world), than to use models with less elements. Nevertheless, even when scientists can calculate by using more complex models, they usually use more simple models. This fact gives us the key to clarify an important role of models in scientific explanation. In this presentation, I would like to show that using simple models as possible makes it possible to explain phenomena thus only achieving unification is insufficient for explanation.

Scientific Understanding and the Explanatory Use of False Models

2015

In model-based sciences, like biology, models play an outstanding explanatory role. In recent times, some authors have shown how the notion of understanding could shed light on the analysis of explanation based on models. This notion has attracted growing attention in philosophy of science. Three important questions have been central in the debate: (1) What is scientific understanding?; (2) is understanding factive, i.e., does understanding presuppose or imply truth?; and (3) can understanding be objective? I will outline and assess the main answers to these questions and I will support my personal contribution to question number 2 and 3.

The Nature of Scientific Models: Abstract Artifacts That Determine Fictional Systems

Synthese Library

Cartwright (How the laws of physics lie. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983) said: "A model is a work of fiction". Since then a good deal of philosophical literature has advocated that scientific models are fictional objects. In this contribution we will try to show that Cartwright's dictum is correct, but that scientific models are not fictional objects. We distinguish between models as abstract objects and the fictional systems that they determine, where the latter can be in partial correspondence with parcels of the world. We also contrast our view with other recent approaches for scientific models, among them Contessa's dualist view as well as Frigg's, Toon's and Levy's accounts based on Walton's Pretence Theory.

Scientific theories, models, and the semantic approach

Principia, 2007

The world science describes tends to have a very strange look. We can't see atoms or force fields, nor are they imaginable within visualizable categories, so neither can we even imagine what the world must be like according to recent physical theories. That tension, between what science depicts as reality and how things appear to us, though it is more striking now, has been with us since modern science began. It can be addressed, and perhaps alleviated by inquiring into how science represents nature. In general, representation is selective, the selection is of what is relevant to the purpose at hand, and success may even require distortion. From this point of view, the constraint on science, that it must 'save the phenomena', takes on a new form. The question to be faced is how the perspectival character of the appearances (that is, contents of measurement outcomes) can be related to the hidden structure that the sciences postulate. In the competing interpretations of quantum mechanics we can see how certain traditional ideals and constraints are left behind. Specifically, Carlo Rovelli's Relational Quantum Mechanics offers a probative example of the freedom of scientific representation. Abstract Bas van Fraassen endorses both common-sense realism -the view, roughly, that the ordinary macroscopic objects that we take to exist actually do existand constructive empiricism -the view, roughly, that the aim of science is truth about the observable world. But what happens if common-sense realism and science come into conflict? I argue that it is reasonable to think that they could come into conflict, by giving some motivation for a mental monist solution to the measurement problem of quantum mechanics. I then consider whether, in a situation where science favors the mental monist interpretation, van Fraassen would want to give up common-sense realism or would want to give up science.