Salis, Fiora (2019) The New Fiction View of Models. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. ISSN 1464-3537

Preview

Text The New Fiction View of Models_Final.pdf Download (807kB) | Preview

Abstract

How do models represent reality? There are two conditions that scientific models must satisfy to be representations of real systems, the aboutness condition and the epistemic condition. In this paper, I critically assess the two main fictionalist theories of models as representations, the indirect fiction view and the direct fiction view, with respect to these conditions. And I develop a novel proposal, what I call ‘the new fiction view of models’. On this view, models are akin to fictional stories; they represent real-world phenomena if they stand in a denotation relation with reality; and they enable knowledge of reality via the generation of theoretical hypotheses, model-world comparisons and direct attributions.

---

Export/Citation:

EndNote | BibTeX | Dublin Core | ASCII/Text Citation (Chicago) | HTML Citation | OpenURL

Social Networking:

Share |

---

Item Type:	Published Article or Volume
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Salis, Fiora fiora.salis@york.ac.uk 0000-0001-8258-0587
Keywords:	scientific models; scientific representation; make-believe; denotation; theoretical hypotheses; mental files
Subjects:	General Issues > Models and Idealization
Depositing User:	Dr Fiora Salis
Date Deposited:	11 Apr 2019 13:02
Last Modified:	11 Apr 2019 13:02
Item ID:	15895
Journal or Publication Title:	British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Subjects:	General Issues > Models and Idealization
Date:	2019
ISSN:	1464-3537
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/15895

Monthly Views for the past 3 years

Monthly Downloads for the past 3 years

Plum Analytics

Actions (login required)

View Item