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  1. 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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  • The Story of the Ghost in the Machine.Adam Toon - 2021 - In Sonia Sedivy (ed.), Art, Representation, and Make-Believe: Essays on the Philosophy of Kendall L. Walton. New York: Routledge.
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  • The Reflex Machine and the Cybernetic Brain: The Critique of Abstraction and its Application to Computationalism.M. Chirimuuta - 2020 - Perspectives on Science 28 (3):421-457.
    Objections to the computational theory of cognition, inspired by twentieth century phenomenology, have tended to fixate on the embodiment and embeddedness of intelligence. In this paper I reconstruct a line of argument that focusses primarily on the abstract nature of scientific models, of which computational models of the brain are one sort. I observe that the critique of scientific abstraction was rather commonplace in the philosophy of the 1920s and 30s and that attention to it aids the reading of The (...)
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  • Fictionalism of Anticipation.Raimundas Vidunas - 2021 - Biosemiotics 14 (1):181-197.
    A promising recent approach for understanding complex phenomena is recognition of anticipatory behavior of living organisms and social organizations. The anticipatory, predictive action permits learning, novelty seeking, rich experiential existence. I argue that the established frameworks of anticipation, adaptation or learning imply overly passive roles of anticipatory agents, and that a fictionalist standpoint reflects the core of anticipatory behavior better than representational or future references. Cognizing beings enact not just their models of the world, but own make-believe existential agendas as (...)
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  • Thoughts on the Scientific Study of Phenomenal Consciousness.Stan Klein - 2021 - Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 8 (74-80).
    This Target paper is about the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness (i.e., how is subjective experience possible given the scientific presumption that everything from molecules to minerals to minds is wholly physical?). I first argue that one of the most valuable tools in the scientific arsenal (metaphor) cannot be recruited to address the hard problem due to the inability to forge connections between the stubborn fact of subjective experience and physically grounded models of scientific explanation. I then argue that adherence (...)
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  • Fiction As a Vehicle for Truth: Moving Beyond the Ontic Conception.Alisa Bokulich - 2016 - The Monist 99 (3):260-279.
    Despite widespread evidence that fictional models play an explanatory role in science, resistance remains to the idea that fictions can explain. A central source of this resistance is a particular view about what explanations are, namely, the ontic conception of explanation. According to the ontic conception, explanations just are the concrete entities in the world. I argue this conception is ultimately incoherent and that even a weaker version of the ontic conception fails. Fictional models can succeed in offering genuine explanations (...)
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  • A Defense of Experiential Realism: The Need to take Phenomenological Reality on its own Terms in the Study of the Mind.Stan Klein - 2015 - Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 2 (1):41-56.
    In this paper I argue for the importance of treating mental experience on its own terms. In defense of “experiential realism” I offer a critique of modern psychology’s all-too-frequent attempts to effect an objectification and quantification of personal subjectivity. The question is “What can we learn about experiential reality from indices that, in the service of scientific objectification, transform the qualitative properties of experience into quantitative indices?” I conclude that such treatment is neither necessary for realizing, nor sufficient for capturing, (...)
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  • Entre analyse linguistique et théorie générale du droit: La Nomographie de Jeremy Bentham. [REVIEW]Malik Bozzo-Rey - 2009 - International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique 22 (4):425-436.
    Les travaux récents ont permis de rendre justice à la théorie du langage qu’a élaborée Bentham et d’expliquer les enjeux théoriques de son attachement aux mots. Il est donc désormais possible de s’attacher à comprendre les enjeux langagiers à l’oeuvre dans les différents champs de la pensée benthamienne, et plus particulièrement au sein de sa théorie générale du droit. Dès lors, son projet de Nomographie semble aller de soi. Nous nous attacherons à montrer dans quelle mesure ce texte entend tirer (...)
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  • Fictionalism in Metaphysics.Frederick Kroon - 2011 - Philosophy Compass 6 (11):786-803.
    This is a survey of contemporary work on ‘fictionalism in metaphysics’, a term that is taken to signify both the place of fictionalism as a distinctive anti‐realist metaphysics in which usefulness rather than truth is the norm of acceptance, and the fact that philosophers have given fictionalist treatments of a range of specifically metaphysical notions.
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  • Fictionalist Attitudes about Fictional Matters.Daniel Nolan - 2005 - In Mark Eli Kalderon (ed.), Fictionalism in Metaphysics. New York: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 204-233.
    A pressing problem for many non-realist1 theories concerning various specific subject matters is the challenge of making sense of our ordinary propositional attitude claims related to the subject in question. Famously in the case of ethics, to take one example, we have in ordinary language prima facie ascriptions of beliefs and desires involving moral properties and relationships. In the case, for instance, of “Jason believes that Kylie is virtuous”, we appear to have a belief which takes Kylie to be a (...)
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  • Moral fictionalism versus the rest.Daniel Nolan, Greg Restall & Caroline West - 2005 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (3):307 – 330.
    In this paper we introduce a distinct metaethical position, fictionalism about morality. We clarify and defend the position, showing that it is a way to save the 'moral phenomena' while agreeing that there is no genuine objective prescriptivity to be described by moral terms. In particular, we distinguish moral fictionalism from moral quasi-realism, and we show that fictionalism possesses the virtues of quasi-realism about morality, but avoids its vices.
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  • The Spatio-Legal Production of Bodies Through the Legal Fiction of Death.Joshua David Michael Shaw - 2021 - Law and Critique 32 (1):69-90.
    Definitions of death are often referred to as legal fictions since brain death was conceived in the mid-twentieth century. Reference to legal fiction is generally paired with bioethicists’ concern that it facilitates post-mortem tissue donation and the health system generally, by determining death earlier on the continuum of dying and availing more viable tissue and therapeutic resources for others. The author argues that spatio-legal theory, drawing from legal geography, can account for the heterogeneity of effects that the fiction has in (...)
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  • A Kantian view of Suits’ Utopia: ‘a kingdom of autotelically-motivated game players’.Francisco Javier Lopez Frias - 2017 - Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 44 (1):138-151.
    In this paper, I engage the debate on Suits’ theory of games by providing a Kantian view of Utopia. I argue that although the Kantian aspects of Suits’ approach are often overlooked in comparison to its Socratic-Platonic aspects, Kant’s ideas play a fundamental role in Suits’ proposal. In particular, Kant’s concept of ‘regulative idea’ is the basis of Suits’ Utopia. I regard Utopia as Suits’ regulative idea on game playing. In doing so, I take Utopia to play a double role (...)
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  • Fictions, inference and realism.Mauricio Suárez - 2010 - In John Woods (ed.), Fictions and Models: New Essays. Philosophia.
    Abstract: It is often assumed without argument that fictionalism in the philosophy of science contradicts scientific realism. This paper is a critical analysis of this assumption. The kind of fictionalism that is at present discussed in philosophy of science is characterised, and distinguished from fictionalism in other areas. A distinction is then drawn between forms of fictional representation, and two competing accounts of fiction in science are discussed. I then outline explicitly what I take to be the argument for the (...)
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  • Models and fictions in science.Peter Godfrey-Smith - 2009 - Philosophical Studies 143 (1):101 - 116.
    Non-actual model systems discussed in scientific theories are compared to fictions in literature. This comparison may help with the understanding of similarity relations between models and real-world target systems. The ontological problems surrounding fictions in science may be particularly difficult, however. A comparison is also made to ontological problems that arise in the philosophy of mathematics.
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  • “Clever beasts who invented knowing”: Nietzsche's evolutionary biology of knowledge. [REVIEW]C. U. M. Smith - 1987 - Biology and Philosophy 2 (1):65-91.
    Nietzsche was a philosopher, not a biologist, Nevertheless his philosophical thought was deeply influenced by ideas emerging from the evolutionary biology of the nineteenth century. His relationship to the Darwinism of his time is difficult to disentangle. It is argued that he was in a sense an unwitting Darwinist. It follows that his philosophical thought is of considerable interest to those concerned to develop an evolutionary biology of mankind. His approach can be likened to that of an extraterrestrial sociobiologist studying (...)
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  • (1 other version)Models and fiction.Roman Frigg - 2007 - Synthese 172 (2):251-268.
    Most scientific models are not physical objects, and this raises important questions. What sort of entity are models, what is truth in a model, and how do we learn about models? In this paper I argue that models share important aspects in common with literary fiction, and that therefore theories of fiction can be brought to bear on these questions. In particular, I argue that the pretence theory as developed by Walton (1990, Mimesis as make-believe: on the foundations of the (...)
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  • What Second Order Science Reveals About Scientific Claims: Incommensurability, Doubt, and a Lack of Explication.Michael Lissack - 2017 - Foundations of Science 22 (3):575-593.
    The traditional sciences often bracket away ambiguity through the imposition of “enabling constraints”—making a set of assumptions and then declaring ceteris paribus. These enabling constraints take the form of uncritically examined presuppositions or “uceps.” Second order science reveals hidden issues, problems and assumptions which all too often escape the attention of the practicing scientist. These hidden values—precisely because they are hidden and not made explicit—can get in the way of the public’s acceptance of a scientific claim. A conflict in understood (...)
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  • Wittgensteinian instrumentalism.Alan Musgrave - 1980 - Theoria 46 (2-3):65-105.
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  • Fictionalism.Arthur Fine - 1993 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 18 (1):1-18.
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  • A critique of the inferential paradigm in perception.Aaron Ben-Zeev - 1987 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 17 (3):243–263.
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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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  • Pascal's syndrome: Positivism as a symptom of depression and mania.Hiram Caton - 1986 - Zygon 21 (3):319-351.
    . The present study applies results and methods of psychobiology to intellectual history. Pascal's syndrome is a depressive neurosis associated with morbid effects of scientific certainty. The syndrome is characterized by self‐mortification and conversion experience that represses distressing certainties. The dynamics of the syndrome are assessed from Blake Pascal's psychosis. The ideation of the syndrome is evaluated by reference to the neurology of altered states of consciousness and the biogenic amine hypothesis of depression and mania. The evaluation yields a description (...)
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  • The logic of representation in political rituals.Ragnar M. Bergem - 2018 - International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 79 (3):251-260.
    ABSTRACTPolitical rituals, like the sovereign acclamation described in Rousseau’s social contract, exhibit a logic of representation that seem to oscillate between presence and absence, and enact a problematic identification of the people as a multitude of individuals and as a whole. This article explores this logic of rituals by comparing problems of political representation in Rousseau and Agamben with the highest principle of Aristotle’s philosophy. It thus elucidates the problem of representation in rituals of political power.
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  • Possible worlds and ideology.Constant Thomas - 2017 - Dissertation, Cardiff University
    The broad aim of this thesis is to explore fruitful connections between ideology theory and the philosophy of possible worlds. Ideologies are full of modal concepts, such as possibility, potential, necessity, essence, contingency and accident. Typically, PWs are articulated for the analysis and illumination of modal concepts. That naturally suggests a method for theorising ideological modality, utilising PW theory. The specific conclusions of the thesis proffer a number of original contributions to knowledge: 1) PWs should only be used for explication (...)
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  • Constructive methodological deflationism, dialetheism and the Liar.David Liggins - 2014 - Analysis 74 (4):566-574.
    Thanks to the work of Kendall Walton, appeals to the notion of pretence (or make-believe) have become popular in philosophy. Now the notion has begun to appear in accounts of truth. My aim here is to assess one of these accounts, namely the ‘constructive methodological deflationism’ put forward by Jc Beall. After introducing the view, I argue that Beall does not manage to overcome the problem of psychological implausibility. Although Beall claims that constructive methodological deflationism supports dialetheism, I argue that (...)
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  • Four contemporary interpretations of the nature of science.J. O. Wisdom - 1971 - Foundations of Physics 1 (3):269-284.
    Instrumentalism is an approach to science that treats a theory as a tool and only as a tool for computation; it dispenses with the concept of truth.Conventionalism treats a theory as true by convention if it forms a pattern of observations from which correct predictions can be made.Operationalism denies meaning to the concepts of a theory unless they can be defined operationally. It is argued in this paper that truth-value is indispensable to science, because a theory can be rejected only (...)
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  • Desperate Acts and Compromises.Alexander Wilson - 2022 - Foundations of Science 27 (3):1001-1008.
    This article expands on what Bernard Stiegler describes as “The Ordeal of Truth”. Through an evolutionary account of cognition and its exteriorization in human technology, I highlight a recurring tension in philosophy between the “as-if” nature of our models and representations, and the doubt that infects even our most stable understanding of the world. Truth is here associated to the process of metastabilization that characterizes the biological organism. The famous case of Clive Wearing’s severe amnesia, as well as the fictional (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Second Order Science: Examining Hidden Presuppositions in the Practice of Science.Michael Lissack - 2017 - Foundations of Science 22 (3):557-573.
    The traditional sciences have always had trouble with ambiguity. To overcome this barrier, ‘science’ has imposed “enabling constraints”—hidden assumptions which are given the status of ceteris paribus. Such assumptions allow ambiguity to be bracketed away at the expense of transparency. These enabling constraints take the form of uncritically examined presuppositions, which we refer to throughout the article as “uceps.” The meanings of the various uceps are shown via their applicability to the science of climate change. Second order science examines variations (...)
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  • The autonomy of the mentally ill: A case-study in individualistic ethics.Nathaniel Laor - 1984 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 14 (3):331-349.
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  • On the Prospects of Modal Fictionalism.Michael-John Turp - 2007 - Gnosis 8 (2):31-47.
    I argue that fictionalism is an unpromising alternative to realism in two important respects. First, fictionalism offers a less satisfactory modal semantics because the incorporated fictive operator is itself modal and its results differ significantly from realism. Second, fictionalism struggles to provide us with a satisfactory account of the ontological grounding of modal truth and finds itself in opposition to several influential accounts of fictional objects which I discuss. I conclude by suggesting that, given the fictionalist’s motivation, a more promising (...)
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