Nguyen, James and Frigg, Roman (2017) Mathematics is not the only language in the book of nature. [Preprint]

Preview

Text appl_maths_2017.pdf Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

How does mathematics apply to something non-mathematical? We distinguish between a general application problem and a special application problem. A critical examination of the answer that structural mapping accounts offer to the former problem leads us to identify a lacuna in these accounts: they have to presuppose that target systems are structured and yet leave this presupposition unexplained. We propose to fill this gap with an account that attributes structures to targets through structure generating descriptions. These descriptions are physical descriptions and so there is no such thing as a solely mathematical account of a target system.

---

Export/Citation:

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

Social Networking:

Share |

---

Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Nguyen, James J.Nguyen1@lse.ac.uk Frigg, Roman r.p.frigg@lse.ac.uk
Keywords:	Application of mathematics; structure; mapping account; representation; isomorphism; physical descriptions.
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Mathematics > Applicability General Issues > Models and Idealization
Depositing User:	Roman Frigg
Date Deposited:	03 Aug 2017 12:37
Last Modified:	03 Aug 2017 12:37
Item ID:	13295
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Mathematics > Applicability General Issues > Models and Idealization
Date:	July 2017
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/13295

Monthly Views for the past 3 years

Monthly Downloads for the past 3 years

Plum Analytics

Actions (login required)

View Item