Seal, Anish (2024) The Problem of Differential Importability and Scientific Modeling. Philosophies, 9 (6). p. 164.
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Abstract
Abstract: The practice of science appears to involve “model-talk”. Scientists, one thinks, are in the business of giving accounts of reality. Scientists, in the process of furnishing such accounts, talk about what they call “models”. Philosophers of science have inspected what this talk of models suggests about how scientific theories manage to represent reality. There are, it seems, at least three distinct philosophical views on the role of scientif i c models in science’s portrayal of reality: the abstractionist view, the indirect fictionalist view, and the direct fictionalist view. In this essay, I try to articulate a question about what makes a scientific model more or less appropriate for a specific domain of reality. More precisely, I ask, “What accounts for the fact that given a determinate target domain, some scientific models, but not others, are thought to be “appropriate” for that domain?” I then consider whether and the degree to which each of the mentioned views on scientif i c models institutes a satisfactory response to this question. I conclude that, amongst those views, the direct f i ctionalist view seems to have the most promising response. I then utilize this argument to develop a more precise account of the problem of differential importability, and ultimately offer a more general and less presumptive argument that the problem seems to be optimally solved by justifying comparative evaluation of model-importabilities solely in terms of comparative evaluations of what I characterize as models’ “holistic” predictive success.
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| Item Type: | Published Article or Volume | ||||||
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| Keywords: | ontology of scientific models; importability; differential importability; fictionalism; abstractionism; realism; nominalism | ||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Evidence General Issues > Experimentation General Issues > Explanation General Issues > Models and Idealization General Issues > Realism/Anti-realism |
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| Depositing User: | Mr. Anish Seal | ||||||
| Date Deposited: | 28 Oct 2024 12:08 | ||||||
| Last Modified: | 28 Oct 2024 12:08 | ||||||
| Item ID: | 24117 | ||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Philosophies | ||||||
| Publisher: | MDPI | ||||||
| Official URL: | https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?ur... | ||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Evidence General Issues > Experimentation General Issues > Explanation General Issues > Models and Idealization General Issues > Realism/Anti-realism |
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| Date: | 26 October 2024 | ||||||
| Page Range: | p. 164 | ||||||
| Volume: | 9 | ||||||
| Number: | 6 | ||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/24117 |
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