Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Holistic modeling: an objection to Weisberg’s weighted feature-matching account.Wei Fang - 2017 - Synthese 194 (5):1743–1764.
    Michael Weisberg’s account of scientific models concentrates on the ways in which models are similar to their targets. He intends not merely to explain what similarity consists in, but also to capture similarity judgments made by scientists. In order to scrutinize whether his account fulfills this goal, I outline one common way in which scientists judge whether a model is similar enough to its target, namely maximum likelihood estimation method. Then I consider whether Weisberg’s account could capture the judgments involved (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • The Idealization of Causation in Mechanistic Explanation.Alan C. Love & Marco J. Nathan - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (5):761-774.
    Causal relations among components and activities are intentionally misrepresented in mechanistic explanations found routinely across the life sciences. Since several mechanists explicitly advocate accurately representing factors that make a difference to the outcome, these idealizations conflict with the stated rationale for mechanistic explanation. We argue that these idealizations signal an overlooked feature of reasoning in molecular and cell biology—mechanistic explanations do not occur in isolation—and suggest that explanatory practices within the mechanistic tradition share commonalities with model-based approaches prevalent in population (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  • Models and Maps: An Essay on Epistemic Representation.Gabriele Contessa - manuscript
    This book defends a two-tiered account of epistemic representation--the sort of representation relation that holds between representations such as maps and scientific models and their targets. It defends a interpretational account of epistemic representation and a structural similarity account of overall faithful epistemic representation.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • How are Models and Explanations Related?Yasha Rohwer & Collin Rice - 2016 - Erkenntnis 81 (5):1127-1148.
    Within the modeling literature, there is often an implicit assumption about the relationship between a given model and a scientific explanation. The goal of this article is to provide a unified framework with which to analyze the myriad relationships between a model and an explanation. Our framework distinguishes two fundamental kinds of relationships. The first is metaphysical, where the model is identified as an explanation or as a partial explanation. The second is epistemological, where the model produces understanding that is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology.Herman Cappelen, Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.) - 2016 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • (1 other version)The structure of idealization in biological theories: the case of the Wright-Fisher model.Xavier de Donato Rodríguez & Alfonso Arroyo Santos - 2012 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 43 (1):11-27.
    In this paper we present a new framework of idealization in biology. We characterize idealizations as a network of counterfactual and hypothetical conditionals that can exhibit different “degrees of contingency”. We use this idea to say that, in departing more or less from the actual world, idealizations can serve numerous epistemic, methodological or heuristic purposes within scientific research. We defend that, in part, this structure explains why idealizations, despite being deformations of reality, are so successful in scientific practice. For illustrative (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Abstract and Complete.Alkistis Elliott-Graves - unknown
    There are two notions of abstraction that are often confused. The material view implies that the products of abstraction are not concrete. It is vulnerable to the criticism that abstracting introduces misrepresentations to the system, hence abstraction is indistinguishable from idealization. The omission view fares better against this criticism because it does not entail that abstract objects are non-physical and because it asserts that the way scientists abstract is different to the way they idealize. Moreover, the omission view better captures (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)The Mental States of Persons and their Brains.Tim Crane - 2015 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 76:253-270.
    Cognitive neuroscientists frequently talk about the brain representing the world. Some philosophers claim that this is a confusion. This paper argues that there is no confusion, and outlines one thing that might mean, using the notion of a model derived from the philosophy of science. This description is then extended to make apply to propositional attitude attributions. A number of problems about propositional attitude attributions can be solved or dissolved by treating propositional attitudes as models.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • No Learning from Minimal Models.Roberto Fumagalli - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (5):798-809.
    This article examines the issue of whether consideration of so-called minimal models can prompt learning about real-world targets. Using a widely cited example as a test case, it argues against the increasingly popular view that consideration of minimal models can prompt learning about such targets. The article criticizes influential defenses of this view for failing to explicate by virtue of what properties or features minimal models supposedly prompt learning. It then argues that consideration of minimal models cannot prompt learning about (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Why We Cannot Learn from Minimal Models.Roberto Fumagalli - 2016 - Erkenntnis 81 (3):433-455.
    Philosophers of science have developed several accounts of how consideration of scientific models can prompt learning about real-world targets. In recent years, various authors advocated the thesis that consideration of so-called minimal models can prompt learning about such targets. In this paper, I draw on the philosophical literature on scientific modelling and on widely cited illustrations from economics and biology to argue that this thesis fails to withstand scrutiny. More specifically, I criticize leading proponents of such thesis for failing to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  • International Handbook of Research in History, Philosophy and Science Teaching.Michael R. Matthews (ed.) - 2014 - Springer.
    This inaugural handbook documents the distinctive research field that utilizes history and philosophy in investigation of theoretical, curricular and pedagogical issues in the teaching of science and mathematics. It is contributed to by 130 researchers from 30 countries; it provides a logically structured, fully referenced guide to the ways in which science and mathematics education is, informed by the history and philosophy of these disciplines, as well as by the philosophy of education more generally. The first handbook to cover the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • The Structure of Scientific Theories.Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - 2015 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Scientific inquiry has led to immense explanatory and technological successes, partly as a result of the pervasiveness of scientific theories. Relativity theory, evolutionary theory, and plate tectonics were, and continue to be, wildly successful families of theories within physics, biology, and geology. Other powerful theory clusters inhabit comparatively recent disciplines such as cognitive science, climate science, molecular biology, microeconomics, and Geographic Information Science (GIS). Effective scientific theories magnify understanding, help supply legitimate explanations, and assist in formulating predictions. Moving from their (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   48 citations  
  • Similarity and representation in chemical knowledge practices.Juan Bautista Bengoetxea, Oliver Todt & José Luis Luján - 2014 - Foundations of Chemistry 16 (3):215-233.
    This paper argues for the theoretical and practical validity of similarity as a useful epistemological tool in scientific knowledge generation, specifically in chemistry. Classical analyses of similarity in philosophy of science do not account for the concept’s practical significance in scientific activities. We recur to examples from chemistry to counter the claim of authors like Quine or Goodman to the effect that similarity must be excluded from scientific practices . In conclusion we argue that more recent conceptualizations of the notion (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Model Organisms are Not (Theoretical) Models.Arnon Levy & Adrian Currie - 2015 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 66 (2):327-348.
    Many biological investigations are organized around a small group of species, often referred to as ‘model organisms’, such as the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The terms ‘model’ and ‘modelling’ also occur in biology in association with mathematical and mechanistic theorizing, as in the Lotka–Volterra model of predator-prey dynamics. What is the relation between theoretical models and model organisms? Are these models in the same sense? We offer an account on which the two practices are shown to have different epistemic characters. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   36 citations  
  • Do Apes Read Minds?: Toward a New Folk Psychology.Kristin Andrews - 2012 - MIT Press.
    Andrews argues for a pluralistic folk psychology that employs different kinds of practices and different kinds of cognitive tools (including personality trait attribution, stereotype activation, inductive reasoning about past behavior, and ...
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   94 citations  
  • Modelle.Stephan Hartmann & Daniela Bailer-Jones - 2010 - In Hans Jörg Sandkühler & Others (eds.), Enzyklopädie Philosophie. Meiner Verlag. pp. 1627-1632.
    Der Begriff ‘Modell’ leitet sich vom Lateinischen ‘modulus’ (das Maß) ab, im Italienischen existiert seit dem 16. Jh. ‘modello’ und R. Descartes verwendet im 17. Jh. ‘modèlle’. Während der Begriff in Architektur und Kunst schon seit der Renaissance gängig ist, wird er in den Naturwissenschaften erst im 19. Jh. verwendet.1 Dort greifen wissenschaftliche Modelle die für eine gegebene Problemstellung als wesentlich erachteten Charakteristika (Eigenschaften, Beziehungen, etc.) eines Untersuchungsgegenstandes heraus und machen diesen so einem Verständnis bzw. einer weiterführenden Untersuchung zugänglich. Es (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Biological Explanation.Angela Potochnik - 2013 - In Kostas Kampourakis (ed.), The Philosophy of Biology: a Companion for Educators. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 49-65.
    One of the central aims of science is explanation: scientists seek to uncover why things happen the way they do. This chapter addresses what kinds of explanations are formulated in biology, how explanatory aims influence other features of the field of biology, and the implications of all of this for biology education. Philosophical treatments of scientific explanation have been both complicated and enriched by attention to explanatory strategies in biology. Most basically, whereas traditional philosophy of science based explanation on derivation (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Reasoning as a source of justification.Magdalena Balcerak Jackson & Brendan Balcerak Jackson - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 164 (1):113-126.
    In this essay we argue that reasoning can sometimes generate epistemic justification, rather than merely transmitting justification that the subject already possesses to new beliefs. We also suggest a way to account for it in terms of the relationship between epistemic normative requirements, justification and cognitive capacities.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  • Models, Sherlock Holmes and the Emperor Claudius.Adam Toon - manuscript
    Recently, a number of authors have suggested that we understand scientific models in the same way as fictional characters, like Sherlock Holmes. The biggest challenge for this approach concerns the ontology of fictional characters. I consider two responses to this challenge, given by Roman Frigg, Ronald Giere and Peter Godfrey-Smith, and argue that neither is successful. I then suggest an alternative approach. While parallels with fiction are useful, I argue that models of real systems are more aptly compared to works (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • How much work do scientific images do?Stephen Downes - 2012 - Spontaneous Generations 6 (1):115-130.
    In this paper, I defend the view that there are many scientific images that have a serious epistemic role in science but this role is not adequately accounted for by the going view of representation and its attendant theoretical commitments. The relevant view of representation is Laura Perini’s account of representation for scientific images. I draw on Adina Roskies’ work on scientific images as well as work on models in science to support my conclusion.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Models, Fictions, and Realism: Two Packages.Arnon Levy - 2012 - Philosophy of Science 79 (5):738-748.
    Some philosophers of science – the present author included – appeal to fiction as an interpretation of the practice of modeling. This raises the specter of an incompatibility with realism, since fiction-making is essentially non-truth-regulated. I argue that the prima facie conflict can be resolved in two ways, each involving a distinct notion of fiction and a corresponding formulation of realism. The main goal of the paper is to describe these two packages. Toward the end I comment on how to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   31 citations  
  • Optimality explanations: a plea for an alternative approach.Collin Rice - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (5):685-703.
    Recently philosophers of science have begun to pay more attention to the use of highly idealized mathematical models in scientific theorizing. An important example of this kind of highly idealized modeling is the widespread use of optimality models within evolutionary biology. One way to understand the explanations provided by these models is as a censored causal explanation: an explanation that omits certain causal factors in order to focus on a modular subset of the causal processes that led to the explanandum. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   46 citations  
  • Metaphysics as modeling: the handmaiden’s tale.L. A. Paul - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 160 (1):1-29.
    Critics of contemporary metaphysics argue that it attempts to do the hard work of science from the ease of the armchair. Physics, not metaphysics, tells us about the fundamental facts of the world, and empirical psychology is best placed to reveal the content of our concepts about the world. Exploring and understanding the world through metaphysical reflection is obsolete. In this paper, I will show why this critique of metaphysics fails, arguing that metaphysical methods used to make claims about the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   142 citations  
  • A glass half-full: Brian Skyrms's signals.Kim Sterelny - 2012 - Economics and Philosophy 28 (1):73-86.
    ExtractBrian Skyrms's Signals has the virtues familiar from his Evolution of the Social Contract and The Stag Hunt. He begins with a very simple model of agents in interaction, and in a series of brief and beautifully clear chapters, this model and its successors are explored, elaborated, connected and illustrated through biological theory and the social sciences. Signals borrows its core model from David Lewis: it is Lewis's signalling game. In this game, two agents interact. One agent can observe which (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Scientific Models.Stephen M. Downes - 2011 - Philosophy Compass 6 (11):757-764.
    This contribution provides an assessment of the epistemological role of scientific models. The prevalent view that all scientific models are representations of the world is rejected. This view points to a unified way of resolving epistemic issues for scientific models. The emerging consensus in philosophy of science that models have many different epistemic roles in science is presented and defended.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Playing with molecules.Adam Toon - 2011 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 42 (4):580-589.
    Recent philosophy of science has seen a number of attempts to understand scientific models by looking to theories of fiction. In previous work, I have offered an account of models that draws on Kendall Walton’s ‘make-believe’ theory of art. According to this account, models function as ‘props’ in games of make-believe, like children’s dolls or toy trucks. In this paper, I assess the make-believe view through an empirical study of molecular models. I suggest that the view gains support when we (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  • Isolation Is Not Characteristic of Models.Till Grüne-Yanoff - 2011 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 25 (2):119-137.
    Modelling cannot be characterized as isolating, nor models as isolations. This article presents three arguments to that effect, against Uskali Mäki's account of models. First, while isolation proceeds through a process of manipulation and control, modelling typically does not proceed through such a process. Rather, modellers postulate assumptions, without seeking to justify them by reference to a process of isolation. Second, while isolation identifies an isolation base—a concrete environment it seeks to control and manipulate—modelling typically does not identify such a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Mechanistic models of population-level phenomena.John Matthewson & Brett Calcott - 2011 - Biology and Philosophy 26 (5):737-756.
    This paper is about mechanisms and models, and how they interact. In part, it is a response to recent discussion in philosophy of biology regarding whether natural selection is a mechanism. We suggest that this debate is indicative of a more general problem that occurs when scientists produce mechanistic models of populations and their behaviour. We can make sense of claims that there are mechanisms that drive population-level phenomena such as macroeconomics, natural selection, ecology, and epidemiology. But talk of mechanisms (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Idealizations and scientific understanding.Moti Mizrahi - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 160 (2):237-252.
    In this paper, I propose that the debate in epistemology concerning the nature and value of understanding can shed light on the role of scientific idealizations in producing scientific understanding. In philosophy of science, the received view seems to be that understanding is a species of knowledge. On this view, understanding is factive just as knowledge is, i.e., if S knows that p, then p is true. Epistemologists, however, distinguish between different kinds of understanding. Among epistemologists, there are those who (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   72 citations  
  • Approaching the truth via belief change in propositional languages.Gustavo Cevolani & Francesco Calandra - 2009 - In M. Suàrez, M. Dorato & M. Rèdei (eds.), EPSA Epistemology and Methodology of Science: Launch of the European Philosophy of Science Association. Springer. pp. 47--62.
    Starting from the sixties of the past century theory change has become a main concern of philosophy of science. Two of the best known formal accounts of theory change are the post-Popperian theories of verisimilitude (PPV for short) and the AGM theory of belief change (AGM for short). In this paper, we will investigate the conceptual relations between PPV and AGM and, in particular, we will ask whether the AGM rules for theory change are effective means for approaching the truth, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Three conceptions of explaining how possibly—and one reductive account.Johannes Persson - 2011 - In Henk W. de Regt (ed.), EPSA Philosophy of Science: Amsterdam 2009. Springer. pp. 275--286.
    Philosophers of science have often favoured reductive approaches to how-possibly explanation. This article identifies three alternative conceptions making how-possibly explanation an interesting phenomenon in its own right. The first variety approaches “how possibly X?” by showing that X is not epistemically impossible. This can sometimes be achieved by removing misunderstandings concerning the implications of one’s current belief system but involves characteristically a modification of this belief system so that acceptance of X does not result in contradiction. The second variety offers (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Information in Biology: A Fictionalist Account.Arnon Levy - 2010 - Noûs 45 (4):640-657.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   28 citations  
  • Reduction in real life.Peter Godfrey-Smith - 2008 - In Jakob Hohwy & Jesper Kallestrup (eds.), Being Reduced: New Essays on Reduction, Explanation, and Causation. New York: Oxford University Press.
    The main message of the paper is that there is a disconnect between what many philosophers of mind think of as the scientific practice of reductive or reductionist explanation, and what the most relevant scientific work is actually like. I will sketch what I see as a better view, drawing on various ideas in recent philosophy of science. I then import these ideas into the philosophy of mind, to see what difference they make.1 At the end of the paper I (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Information in biology.Peter Godfrey-Smith - 2007 - In David L. Hull & Michael Ruse (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Biology. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 103--119.
    The concept of information has acquired a strikingly prominent role in contemporary biology. This trend is especially marked within genetics, but it has also become important in other areas, such as evolutionary theory and developmental biology, particularly where these fields border on genetics. The most distinctive biological role for informational concepts, and the one that has generated the most discussion, is in the description of the relations between genes and the various structures and processes that genes play a role in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   38 citations  
  • (1 other version)Philosophy of economics.Daniel M. Hausman - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    This is a comprehensive anthology of works concerning the nature of economics as a science, including classic texts and essays exploring specific branches and schools of economics. Apart from the classics, most of the selections in the third edition are new, as are the introduction and bibliography. No other anthology spans the whole field and offers a comprehensive introduction to questions about economic methodology.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  • Models as make-believe.Adam Toon - 2008 - In Roman Frigg & Matthew Hunter (eds.), Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science. Boston Studies in Philosophy of Science.
    In this paper I propose an account of representation for scientific models based on Kendall Walton’s ‘make-believe’ theory of representation in art. I first set out the problem of scientific representation and respond to a recent argument due to Craig Callender and Jonathan Cohen, which aims to show that the problem may be easily dismissed. I then introduce my account of models as props in games of make-believe and show how it offers a solution to the problem. Finally, I demonstrate (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   54 citations  
  • Population genetics.Samir Okasha - unknown - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • (1 other version)What is bitcoin.Craig Warmke - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (1):25-67.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • How do networks explain? A neo-hempelian approach to network explanations of the ecology of the microbiome.José Díez & Javier Suárez - 2023 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (3):1-26.
    Despite the importance of network analysis in biological practice, dominant models of scientific explanation do not account satisfactorily for how this family of explanations gain their explanatory power in every specific application. This insufficiency is particularly salient in the study of the ecology of the microbiome. Drawing on Coyte et al. (2015) study of the ecology of the microbiome, Deulofeu et al. (2021) argue that these explanations are neither mechanistic, nor purely mathematical, yet they are substantially empirical. Building on their (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • A Complementary Account of Scientific Modelling: Modelling Mechanisms in Cancer Immunology.Martin Zach - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    According to a widely held view, scientific modelling consists in entertaining a set of model descriptions that specify a model. Rather than studying the phenomenon of interest directly, scientists investigate the phenomenon indirectly via a model in the hope of learning about some of the phenomenon’s features. I call this view the description-driven modelling (DDM) account. I argue that although an accurate description of much of scientific research, the DDM account is found wanting as regards the mechanistic modelling found in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Empirical techniques and the accuracy of scientific representations.Dana Matthiessen - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 94 (C):143-157.
    This paper proposes an account of accurate scientific representation in terms of techniques that produce data from a target phenomenon. I consider an approach to accurate representation that abstracts from such epistemic factors, justified by a thesis I call Ontic Priority. This holds that criteria for representational accuracy depend on a pre-established account of the nature of the relation between a model and its target phenomenon. I challenge Ontic Priority, drawing on the observation that many working scientists do not have (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Imagination in science.Alice Murphy - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (6):e12836.
    While discussions of the imagination have been limited in philosophy of science, this is beginning to change. In recent years, a vast literature on imagination in science has emerged. This paper surveys the current field, including the changing attitudes towards the scientific imagination, the fiction view of models, how the imagination can lead to knowledge and understanding, and the value of different types of imagination. It ends with a discussion of the gaps in the current literature, indicating avenues for future (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Laws, Models, and Theories in Biology: A Unifying Interpretation.Pablo Lorenzano - 2020 - In Lorenzo Baravalle & Luciana Zaterka (eds.), Life and Evolution, History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences. pp. 163-207.
    Three metascientific concepts that have been object of philosophical analysis are the concepts oflaw, model and theory. The aim ofthis article is to present the explication of these concepts, and of their relationships, made within the framework of Sneedean or Metatheoretical Structuralism (Balzer et al. 1987), and of their application to a case from the realm of biology: Population Dynamics. The analysis carried out will make it possible to support, contrary to what some philosophers of science in general and of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Models and Fictions: Not So Similar after All?Arnon Levy - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (5):819-828.
    A number of philosophers draw a close analogy between scientific modeling and fiction, often appealing to Kendall Walton’s make-believe view. I assess the models-fictions analogy from a cognitive a...
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Modeling Morality.Walter Veit - 2019 - In Matthieu Fontaine, Cristina Barés-Gómez, Francisco Salguero-Lamillar, Lorenzo Magnani & Ángel Nepomuceno-Fernández (eds.), Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology: Inferential Models for Logic, Language, Cognition and Computation. Springer Verlag. pp. 83–102.
    Unlike any other field, the science of morality has drawn attention from an extraordinarily diverse set of disciplines. An interdisciplinary research program has formed in which economists, biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and even philosophers have been eager to provide answers to puzzling questions raised by the existence of human morality. Models and simulations, for a variety of reasons, have played various important roles in this endeavor. Their use, however, has sometimes been deemed as useless, trivial and inadequate. The role of models (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • Model Pluralism.Walter Veit - 2019 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 50 (2):91-114.
    This paper introduces and defends an account of model-based science that I dub model pluralism. I argue that despite a growing awareness in the philosophy of science literature of the multiplicity, diversity, and richness of models and modeling practices, more radical conclusions follow from this recognition than have previously been inferred. Going against the tendency within the literature to generalize from single models, I explicate and defend the following two core theses: any successful analysis of models must target sets of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   38 citations  
  • Thumper the Infinitesimal Rabbit: A Fictionalist Perspective on Some “Unimaginable” Model Systems in Biology.Brian McLoone - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (4):662-671.
    Fictionalists believe that scientific models are about model systems that are imaginary. Michael Weisberg has claimed that fictionalism is indefensible because many scientific models are about model systems that are unimaginable. According to a certain account of imagination, what Weisberg says is plausible. According to another, more defensible account of imagination, it is not. I discuss these issues within the context of an allegedly unimaginable model system in ecology, but the conclusions I draw are more general. I then describe how (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Formal Semantics and Applied Mathematics: An Inferential Account.Ryan M. Nefdt - 2020 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 29 (2):221-253.
    In this paper, I utilise the growing literature on scientific modelling to investigate the nature of formal semantics from the perspective of the philosophy of science. Specifically, I incorporate the inferential framework proposed by Bueno and Colyvan : 345–374, 2011) in the philosophy of applied mathematics to offer an account of how formal semantics explains and models its data. This view produces a picture of formal semantic models as involving an embedded process of inference and representation applying indirectly to linguistic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Virtual Realism: Really Realism or only Virtually so? A Comment on D. J. Chalmers’s Petrus Hispanus Lectures.Claus Beisbart - 2019 - Disputatio 11 (55):297-331.
    What is the status of a cat in a virtual reality environment? Is it a real object? Or part of a fiction? Virtual realism, as defended by D. J. Chalmers, takes it to be a virtual object that really exists, that has properties and is involved in real events. His preferred specification of virtual realism identifies the cat with a digital object. The project of this paper is to use a comparison between virtual reality environments and scientific computer simulations to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Infinity and the foundations of linguistics.Ryan M. Nefdt - 2019 - Synthese 196 (5):1671-1711.
    The concept of linguistic infinity has had a central role to play in foundational debates within theoretical linguistics since its more formal inception in the mid-twentieth century. The conceptualist tradition, marshalled in by Chomsky and others, holds that infinity is a core explanandum and a link to the formal sciences. Realism/Platonism takes this further to argue that linguistics is in fact a formal science with an abstract ontology. In this paper, I argue that a central misconstrual of formal apparatus of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations