Philosophers have debated at length the epistemological status of scientific thought experiments. I contend that the literature on this topic still lacks a common conceptual framework, a lacuna that produces radical disagreement among the participants in this debate. To remedy this problem, I suggest focusing on the distinction between the internal and the external validity of an experiment, which is also crucial for thought experiments. I then develop an account of both kinds of validity in the context of thought experiments. (...) I show that we can naturally conceptualise internal validity in terms of games of make-believe. Then, I argue that external validity is best defined as accurate representation of a target system. Finally, I turn back to the current debate on thought experiments and show that my diarchic account provides a general framework that can be shared by the competing philosophical views, as well as a fruitful guide for their reconciliation. (shrink)

A persistent criticism of radical embodied cognitive science is that it will be impossible to explain “real cognition” without invoking mental representations. This paper provides an account of explicit, real-time thinking of the kind we engage in when we imagine counter-factual situations, remember the past, and plan for the future. We first present a very general non-representational account of explicit thinking, based on pragmatist philosophy of science. We then present a more detailed instantiation of this general account drawing on nonlinear (...) dynamics and ecological psychology. (shrink)

Representationalism—the view that scientific modeling is best understood in representational terms—is the received view in contemporary philosophy of science. Contributions to this literature have focused on a number of puzzles concerning the nature of representation and the epistemic role of misrepresentation, without considering whether these puzzles are the product of an inadequate analytical framework. The goal of this paper is to suggest that this possibility should be taken seriously. The argument has two parts, employing the “can’t have” and “don’t need” (...) tactics drawn from philosophy of mind. On the one hand, I propose that representationalism doesn’t work: different ways to flesh out representationalism create a tension between its ontological and epistemological components and thereby undermine the view. On the other hand, I propose that representationalism is not needed in the first place—a position I articulate based on a pragmatic stance on the success of scientific research and on the feasibility of alternative philosophical frameworks. I conclude that representationalism is untenable and unnecessary, a philosophical dead end. A new way of thinking is called for if we are to make progress in our understanding of scientific modeling. (shrink)

There is increasing attention to the centrality of idealization in science. One common view is that models and other idealized representations are important to science, but that they fall short in one or more ways. On this view, there must be an intermediary step between idealized representation and the traditional aims of science, including truth, explanation, and prediction. Here I develop an alternative interpretation of the relationship between idealized representation and the aims of science. In my view, continuing, widespread idealization (...) calls into question the idea that science aims for truth. I argue that understanding must replace truth as the ultimate epistemic aim of science. Additionally, science has a wide variety aims, epistemic and non-epistemic, and these aims motivate different kinds of scientific products. Finally, I show how these diverse aims---all rather distant from truth---result in the expanded influence of social values on science. (shrink)

“The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology” published by Richard Levins in 1966 has been cited over 2500 times. For a paper concerned with modeling approaches in population biology a surprisingly large part of the attention. The Strategy received comes from history and philosophy of biology, and specifically from accounts on model and model formulation. The Strategy is an unusual paper; it presents neither new data nor a new formal model; at times it reads like a manifesto for some (...) modeling approach, without specifying which broader program that approach intends to support. When these peculiarities of The Strategy are even mentioned, the philosophical literature tends to explain them away by invoking Levins’ Marxist commitments. In contrast, I argue that those peculiarities can be explained by examining the programmatic purpose of the paper; starting from his doctoral work, Levins was trying to establish a research program meant to account for the relations between fitness and environment in different terms than the prevalent lock-and-key view. My paper brings that program back to the discussion, explains its relation to competing approaches and examines Levins’ approach to modeling in light of that context. (shrink)

A question at the intersection of scientific modeling and public choice is how to deal with uncertainty about model predictions. This "high-level" uncertainty is necessarily value-laden, and thus must be treated as irreducibly subjective. Nevertheless, formal methods of uncertainty analysis should still be employed for the purpose of clarifying policy debates. I argue that such debates are best informed by models which integrate objective features with subjective ones. This integrated subjectivism is illustrated with a case study from the literature on (...) monetary policy. The paper concludes with some morals for the use of models in determining climate policy. (shrink)