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  1. How simulations fail.Patrick Grim, Robert Rosenberger, Adam Rosenfeld, Brian Anderson & Robb E. Eason - 2011 - Synthese 190 (12):2367-2390.
    ‘The problem with simulations is that they are doomed to succeed.’ So runs a common criticism of simulations—that they can be used to ‘prove’ anything and are thus of little or no scientific value. While this particular objection represents a minority view, especially among those who work with simulations in a scientific context, it raises a difficult question: what standards should we use to differentiate a simulation that fails from one that succeeds? In this paper we build on a structural (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • An agent-based conception of models and scientific representation.Ronald N. Giere - 2010 - Synthese 172 (2):269–281.
    I argue for an intentional conception of representation in science that requires bringing scientific agents and their intentions into the picture. So the formula is: Agents (1) intend; (2) to use model, M; (3) to represent a part of the world, W; (4) for some purpose, P. This conception legitimates using similarity as the basic relationship between models and the world. Moreover, since just about anything can be used to represent anything else, there can be no unified ontology of models. (...)
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  • Models, Fiction and the Imagination.Arnon Levy - 2024 - In Tarja Knuuttila, Natalia Carrillo & Rami Koskinen (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Scientific Modeling. New York, NY: Routledge.
    Science and fiction seem to lie at opposite ends of the cognitive-epistemic spectrum. The former is typically seen as the study of hard, real-world facts in a rigorous manner. The latter is treated as an instrument of play and recreation, dealing in figments of the imagination. Initial appearances notwithstanding, several central features of scientific modeling in fact suggest a close connection with the imagination and recent philosophers have developed detailed accounts of models that treat them, in one way or another, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Ernst Mach’s Contribution to the Philosophy of Science in Light of Mary B. Hesse’s Postempiricism.Pietro Gori - 2021 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 11 (2):383-411.
    Ernst Mach’s definition of the relationship between thoughts and facts is well known, but the question of how Mach conceived of their actual relationship has received much less attention. This paper aims to address this gap in light of Mary B. Hesse’s view of a postempiricist approach to natural science. As this paper will show, this view is characterized by a constructivist conception of the relationship between theory and facts that seems to be consistent with Mach’s observations on scientific knowledge. (...)
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  • The Fictional Character of Scientific Models.Stacie Friend - 2019 - In Arnon Levy & Peter Godfrey-Smith (eds.), The Scientific Imagination. New York, US: Oup Usa. pp. 101-126.
    Many philosophers have drawn parallels between scientific models and fictions. In this paper I will be concerned with a recent version of the analogy, which compares models to the imagined characters of fictional literature. Though versions of the position differ, the shared idea is that modeling essentially involves imagining concrete systems analogously to the way that we imagine characters and events in response to works of fiction. Advocates of this view argue that imagining concrete systems plays an ineliminable role in (...)
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  • Mental fact and mental fiction.Tim Crane & Katalin Farkas - 2022 - In Tamás Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations. New York & London: Routledge. pp. 303-319.
    It is common to distinguish between conscious mental episodes and standing mental states — those mental features like beliefs, desires or intentions, which a subject can have even if she is not conscious, or when her consciousness is occupied with something else. This paper presents a view of standing mental states according to which these states are less real than episodes of consciousness. It starts from the usual view that states like beliefs and desires are not directly present to the (...)
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  • Mathematization in Synthetic Biology: Analogies, Templates, and Fictions.Andrea Loettgers & Tarja Knuuttila - 2017 - In Martin Carrier & Johannes Lenhard (eds.), Mathematics as a Tool: Tracing New Roles of Mathematics in the Sciences. Springer Verlag.
    In his famous article “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” Eugen Wigner argues for a unique tie between mathematics and physics, invoking even religious language: “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve”. The possible existence of such a unique match between mathematics and physics has been extensively discussed by philosophers and historians of mathematics. Whatever the merits (...)
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  • Synthetic fictions: turning imagined biological systems into concrete ones.Tarja Knuuttila & Rami Koskinen - 2020 - Synthese 198 (9):8233-8250.
    The recent discussion of fictional models has focused on imagination, implicitly considering fictions as something nonconcrete. We present two cases from synthetic biology that can be viewed as concrete fictions. Both minimal cells and alternative genetic systems are modal in nature: they, as well as their abstract cousins, can be used to study unactualized possibilia. We approach these synthetic constructs through Vaihinger’s notion of a semi-fiction and Goodman’s notion of semifactuality. Our study highlights the relative existence of such concrete fictions. (...)
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  • Epistemically useful false beliefs.Duncan Pritchard - 2017 - Philosophical Explorations 20 (sup1):4-20.
    Our interest is in the possibility of there being a philosophically interesting set of useful false beliefs where the utility in question is specifically epistemic. As we will see, it is hard to delineate plausible candidates in this regard, though several are promising at first blush. We begin with the kind of strictly false claims that are said to be often involved in good scientific practice, such as through the use of idealisations and fictions. The problem is that it is (...)
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  • Robustness, Diversity of Evidence, and Probabilistic Independence.Jonah N. Schupbach - 2015 - In Uskali Mäki, Stéphanie Ruphy, Gerhard Schurz & Ioannis Votsis (eds.), Recent Developments in the Philosophy of Science. Cham: Springer. pp. 305-316.
    In robustness analysis, hypotheses are supported to the extent that a result proves robust, and a result is robust to the extent that we detect it in diverse ways. But what precise sense of diversity is at work here? In this paper, I show that the formal explications of evidential diversity most often appealed to in work on robustness – which all draw in one way or another on probabilistic independence – fail to shed light on the notion of diversity (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Theory is as Theory Does: Scientific Practice and Theory Structure in Biology.Alan C. Love - 2013 - Biological Theory 7 (4):325-337, 430.
    Using the context of controversies surrounding evolutionary developmental biology (EvoDevo) and the possibility of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, I provide an account of theory structure as idealized theory presentations that are always incomplete (partial) and shaped by their conceptual content (material rather than formal organization). These two characteristics are salient because the goals that organize and regulate scientific practice, including the activity of using a theory, are heterogeneous. This means that the same theory can be structured differently, in part because (...)
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  • Don’t Blame the Idealizations.Nicholaos Jones - 2013 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 44 (1):85-100.
    Idealizing conditions are scapegoats for scientific hypotheses, too often blamed for falsehood better attributed to less obvious sources. But while the tendency to blame idealizations is common among both philosophers of science and scientists themselves, the blame is misplaced. Attention to the nature of idealizing conditions, the content of idealized hypotheses, and scientists’ attitudes toward those hypotheses shows that idealizing conditions are blameless when hypotheses misrepresent. These conditions help to determine the content of idealized hypotheses, and they do so in (...)
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  • Jump ship, shift gears, or just keep on chugging: Assessing the responses to tensions between theory and evidence in contemporary cosmology.Siska De Baerdemaeker & Nora Mills Boyd - 2020 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 72:205-216.
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  • Scientific representation and dissimilarity.Brandon Boesch - 2019 - Synthese 198 (6):5495-5513.
    In this essay, I examine the role of dissimilarity in scientific representation. After briefly reviewing some of the philosophical literature which places a strong emphasis on the role of similarity, I turn to examine some work from Carroll and Borges which demonstrates that perfect similarity is not valuable in the representational use of maps. Expanding on this insight, I go on to argue that this shows that dissimilarity is an important part of the representational use of maps—a point I then (...)
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  • Qualitative Models in Computational Simulative Sciences: Representation, Confirmation, Experimentation.Nicola Angius - 2019 - Minds and Machines 29 (3):397-416.
    The Epistemology Of Computer Simulation has developed as an epistemological and methodological analysis of simulative sciences using quantitative computational models to represent and predict empirical phenomena of interest. In this paper, Executable Cell Biology and Agent-Based Modelling are examined to show how one may take advantage of qualitative computational models to evaluate reachability properties of reactive systems. In contrast to the thesis, advanced by EOCS, that computational models are not adequate representations of the simulated empirical systems, it is shown how (...)
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  • Is Captain Kirk a natural blonde? Do X-ray crystallographers dream of electron clouds? Comparing model-based inferences in science with fiction.Ann-Sophie Barwich - 2017 - In Otávio Bueno, Steven French, George Darby & Dean Rickles (eds.), Thinking About Science, Reflecting on Art: Bringing Aesthetics and Philosophy of Science Together. New York: Routledge.
    Scientific models share one central characteristic with fiction: their relation to the physical world is ambiguous. It is often unclear whether an element in a model represents something in the world or presents an artifact of model building. Fiction, too, can resemble our world to varying degrees. However, we assign a different epistemic function to scientific representations. As artifacts of human activity, how are scientific representations allowing us to make inferences about real phenomena? In reply to this concern, philosophers of (...)
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  • Continuous culture techniques as simulators for standard cells: Jacques Monod’s, Aron Novick’s and Leo Szilard’s quantitative approach to microbiology.Gabriele Gramelsberger - 2018 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (1):23.
    Continuous culture techniques were developed in the early twentieth century to replace cumbersome studies of cell growth in batch cultures. In contrast to batch cultures, they constituted an open concept, as cells are forced to proliferate by adding new medium while cell suspension is constantly removed. During the 1940s and 1950s new devices have been designed—called “automatic syringe mechanism,” “turbidostat,” “chemostat,” “bactogen,” and “microbial auxanometer”—which allowed increasingly accurate quantitative measurements of bacterial growth. With these devices cell growth came under the (...)
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  • Imagination extended and embedded: artifactual versus fictional accounts of models.Tarja Knuuttila - 2017 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 21):5077-5097.
    This paper presents an artifactual approach to models that also addresses their fictional features. It discusses first the imaginary accounts of models and fiction that set model descriptions apart from imagined-objects, concentrating on the latter :251–268, 2010; Frigg and Nguyen in The Monist 99:225–242, 2016; Godfrey-Smith in Biol Philos 21:725–740, 2006; Philos Stud 143:101–116, 2009). While the imaginary approaches accommodate surrogative reasoning as an important characteristic of scientific modeling, they simultaneously raise difficult questions concerning how the imagined entities are related (...)
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  • Fictions, Conditionals, and Stellar Astrophysics.Mauricio Suárez - 2013 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 27 (3):235-252.
    This article argues in favour of an inferential role for fictions in scientific modelling. The argument proceeds by means of a detailed case study, namely models of the internal structure of stars in stellar astrophysics. The main assumptions in such models are described, and it is argued that they are best understood as useful fictions. The role that conditionals play in these models is explained, and it is argued that fictional assumptions play an important role as either background or antecedent (...)
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  • Science and Fiction: Analysing the Concept of Fiction in Science and its Limits.Ann-Sophie Barwich - 2013 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 44 (2):357-373.
    A recent and growing discussion in philosophy addresses the construction of models and their use in scientific reasoning by comparison with fiction. This comparison helps to explore the problem of mediated observation and, hence, the lack of an unambiguous reference of representations. Examining the usefulness of the concept of fiction for a comparison with non-denoting elements in science, the aim of this paper is to present reasonable grounds for drawing a distinction between these two kinds of representation. In particular, my (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Do fictions explain?James Nguyen - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):3219-3244.
    I argue that fictional models, construed as models that misrepresent certain ontological aspects of their target systems, can nevertheless explain why the latter exhibit certain behaviour. They can do this by accurately representing whatever it is that that behaviour counterfactually depends on. However, we should be sufficiently sensitive to different explanatory questions, i.e., ‘why does certain behaviour occur?’ versus ‘why does the counterfactual dependency invoked to answer that question actually hold?’. With this distinction in mind, I argue that whilst fictional (...)
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  • Mirrors without warnings.Roman Frigg & James Nguyen - 2019 - Synthese 198 (3):2427-2447.
    Veritism, the position that truth is necessary for epistemic acceptability, seems to be in tension with the observation that much of our best science is not, strictly speaking, true when interpreted literally. This generates a paradox: truth is necessary for epistemic acceptability; the claims of science have to be taken literally; much of what science produces is not literally true and yet it is acceptable. We frame Elgin’s project in True Enough as being motivated by, and offering a particular resolution (...)
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  • Incompatible models in chemistry: the case of electronegativity.Hernán Lucas Accorinti - 2019 - Foundations of Chemistry 21 (1):71-81.
    During the second half of the nineteenth century, electronegativity has been one of the most relevant chemical concepts to explain the relationships between chemical substances and their possible reactions. Specifically, EN is a property of the substances that allows them to attract external electrons in bonding situations. The problem arises because EN cannot be measured directly. Indeed, the only way to measure it is through different properties that do can be directly measured, for instance enthalpy, ionization energies or electron affinities. (...)
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  • Interdisciplinarity as Hybrid Modeling.Rolf Hvidtfeldt - 2017 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 48 (1):35-57.
    In this paper, I present a philosophical analysis of interdisciplinary scientific activities. I suggest that it is a fruitful approach to view interdisciplinarity in light of the recent literature on scientific representations. For this purpose I develop a meta-representational model in which interdisciplinarity is viewed in part as a process of integrating distinct scientific representational approaches. The analysis suggests that present methods for the evaluation of interdisciplinary projects places too much emphasis non-epistemic aspects of disciplinary integrations while more or less (...)
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  • On the Origins of the Philosophy of Thought Experiments: The Forerun.Yiftach Fehige & Michael T. Stuart - 2014 - Perspectives on Science 22 (2):179-220.
    Philosophical debate about the nature and function of thought experiments would be impoverished without good historical sources. And while valuable work is being done on the history of thought experiments, a comprehensive discussion of the history of philosophical investigation into thought experiments is still absent in the literature (but see Kühne 2005; Moue et al. 2006). In what follows we take the first steps towards providing a more complete picture of the diverse attempts to shed light on thought experiments.The term (...)
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  • How do models give us knowledge? The case of Carnot’s ideal heat engine.Tarja Knuuttila & Mieke Boon - 2011 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 1 (3):309-334.
    Our concern is in explaining how and why models give us useful knowledge. We argue that if we are to understand how models function in the actual scientific practice the representational approach to models proves either misleading or too minimal. We propose turning from the representational approach to the artefactual, which implies also a new unit of analysis: the activity of modelling. Modelling, we suggest, could be approached as a specific practice in which concrete artefacts, i.e., models, are constructed with (...)
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  • The role of disciplinary perspectives in an epistemology of scientific models.Mieke Boon - 2020 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 10 (3):1-34.
    The purpose of this article is to develop an epistemology of scientific models in scientific research practices, and to show that disciplinary perspectives have crucial role in such an epistemology. A transcendental approach is taken, aimed at explanations of the kinds of questions relevant to the intended epistemology, such as “How is it possible that models provide knowledge about aspects of reality?” The approach is also pragmatic in the sense that the questions and explanations must be adequate and relevant to (...)
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  • Models in Science and Engineering: Imagining, Designing and Evaluating Representations.Michael Poznic - 2017 - Dissertation, Delft University of Technology
    The central question of this thesis is how one can learn about particular targets by using models of those targets. A widespread assumption is that models have to be representative models in order to foster knowledge about targets. Thus the thesis begins by examining the concept of representation from an epistemic point of view and supports an account of representation that does not distinguish between representation simpliciter and adequate representation. Representation, understood in the sense of a representative model, is regarded (...)
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  • A Rough Quarter of the Millennium. Revolutions Through the Lens of Google Ngram Viewer.Mikhail Bukhtoyarov & Anna Bukhtoyarova - 2018 - In M. A. Lapteva (ed.), Информационные технологии в гуманитарных науках. pp. 48-61.
    This study focuses on the interdisciplinary issue of language corpora mining for the purpose of cultural analytics. The authors utilize the comparative cross -cultural approach to highlight the dynamics of “revolution” concept throughout two and a half centuries. They study concept application through the word occurrence in five languages by the means of Google Books Ngram Viewer and trace the waves of concept “popularity”. Most of the word application peaks can be corresponded to the political events called “revolutions” but there (...)
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  • Modelos, idealizaciones: una crítica del ficcionalismo.Alejandro Cassini - 2013 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 17 (3):345.
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  • A Simulacrum Account of Dispositional Properties.Marco J. Nathan - 2013 - Noûs 49 (2):253-274.
    This essay presents a model-theoretic account of dispositional properties, according to which dispositions are not ordinary properties of real entities; dispositions capture the behavior of abstract, idealized models. This account has several payoffs. First, it saves the simple conditional analysis of dispositions. Second, it preserves the general connection between dispositions and regularities, despite the fact that some dispositions are not grounded in actual regularities. Finally, it brings together the analysis and the explanation of dispositions under a unified framework.
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  • Biomorphism and Models in Design.Cameron Shelley - 2015 - In Woosuk Park, Ping Li & Lorenzo Magnani (eds.), Philosophy and Cognitive Science Ii: Western & Eastern Studies. Cham: Springer Verlag.
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  • Virtual Processes and Quantum Tunnelling as Fictions.Richard T. W. Arthur - 2012 - Science & Education 21 (10):1461-1473.
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  • Analogue Models and Universal Machines. Paradigms of Epistemic Transparency in Artificial Intelligence.Hajo Greif - 2022 - Minds and Machines 32 (1):111-133.
    The problem of epistemic opacity in Artificial Intelligence is often characterised as a problem of intransparent algorithms that give rise to intransparent models. However, the degrees of transparency of an AI model should not be taken as an absolute measure of the properties of its algorithms but of the model’s degree of intelligibility to human users. Its epistemically relevant elements are to be specified on various levels above and beyond the computational one. In order to elucidate this claim, I first (...)
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  • Finding truth in fictions: identifying non-fictions in imaginary cracks.Gordon Michael Purves - 2013 - Synthese 190 (2):235-251.
    I critically examine some recent work on the philosophy of scientific fictions, focusing on the work of Winsberg. By considering two case studies in fracture mechanics, the strip yield model and the imaginary crack method, I argue that his reliance upon the social norms associated with an element of a model forces him to remain silent whenever those norms fail to clearly match the characteristic of fictions or non-fictions. In its place, I propose a normative epistemology of fictions which clarifies (...)
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  • Debating the Reality of Race, Caste, and Ethnicity.Harold Kincaid - 2017 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 48 (2):139-167.
    There is a lively ongoing debate among philosophers and social scientists about the reality of race and among social scientists about the reality of caste and ethnicity. This paper tries to sort out what the issues are and makes some preliminary suggestions about what the evidence shows. Standard philosophical analyses try to find the necessary and sufficient conditions of our concept of race. I argue that this is not the best way to approach the issue and that the reality of (...)
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  • Bernard Walliser's Comment raisonnent les économistes: les fonctions des modèles. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2011, 278 pp. [REVIEW]Philippe Verreault-Julien - 2012 - Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 5 (2):144.
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