Abstract
Many models function representationally. Considerable differences notwithstanding, most accounts of representation involve the notion that models denote their targets. Denotation is a dyadic relation that obtains between certain symbols and certain objects. This does not sit well with the fact that many models are not concrete objects. If a model does not exist, how can it denote? We present an antirealist theory of models that reconciles the notion that models don’t exist with the claim that there is real denotation between models and their targets.
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- 1.
Or reference – in the philosophy of language the terms “denotation” and “reference” are often used as synonyms.
- 2.
Kaplan’s (1990) investigation into the nature of words (and proper names in particular) as the media of denotation is a noteworthy exception.
- 3.
Fiction accounts of models have also been advocated by Barberousse and Ludwig (2009), Frigg (2010), Frigg and Nguyen (2016), Giere (2010, 278) (although he stresses that this is restricted to ontology, functionally models and fictions might come apart), Salis (2019) and Salis and Frigg (2020). Levy (2015) and Toon (2012) present accounts that appeal to fiction, but are designed in way that does not require that a model denote a target. For a discussion of their account see Frigg and Ngueyn (2017, 86–88).
- 4.
The objection actually applies more generally: anyone who thinks that models are not concrete objects but denote their targets will face the same challenge.
- 5.
- 6.
See Opie and Opie (1969) for a description of this game.
- 7.
Walton assumes referentialism, the position that utterances of sentences containing proper names express singular propositions. For instance, the proposition “Saint Paul’s Cathedral is Northern Europe’s biggest church” is directly about St Paul’s in virtue of having St Paul’s among its constituents. This view entails that utterances of sentences containing fictional names (names without referents) express either no proposition or a gappy proposition. Walton (1990, Ch. 10) assumes the former and argues that utterances of sentences containing fictional names are to be analysed in terms of kinds of pretence. Friend (2011) and Salis (2013) emphasise that this is insufficient to distinguish different kinds of pretence that seem to be about different fictional objects. They offer alternative analyses in terms of gappy propositions and participation in different networks of information (Friend 2011) and different name-using practices (Salis 2013).
- 8.
In fact, Weisberg (2007) identifies the existence of a secondary object that does the representing as a defining feature of modelling.
- 9.
In the late1960s philosophers of mind and language introduced the notion of a mental file as a cognitive representation of concrete objects as individuals rather than as the possessors of properties. Originally, Grice (1969, 141–142) introduced this notion under the label “dossier” in his discussion of vacuous names and referentially used descriptions. The idea is that our thoughts latch onto reality in a direct way, i.e. through a perceptual relation with individual objects rather than through the mediation of a descriptive condition that looks for the object as the satisfier of a certain set of qualitative features. In line with this idea, Perry (1980) introduced the term “mental file” to account for the phenomenon of continued belief and he appealed to the same notion to account for the phenomenon of co-reference in his (2001, 128–146). Bach (1987, Ch. 3, spec. 34–39, 44) deployed mental files in his discussion of de re thought. More recently, Jeshion (2010) presented a new theory of singular thought as thought from mental files. Friend (2011, 2014) appeals to mental files to explain the phenomenon of intersubjective identification of fictional characters within fictional antirealism. Intersubjective identification of the same object, or co-identification, is further explained in terms of participation in the same information network (Friend 2011, 2014) or the same name-using practice (Salis 2013) supporting the mental files. Linguists have used the notion of a mental file as discourse referents (Heim 1982; Kamp and Reyle 1993; Karttunen 1976). Cognitive psychologists have introduced the analogous notions of object files to study visual representations in adults’ object-directed attention (Pylyshyn 2000, 2001, 2007; Fodor and Pylyshyn 2014) and object concepts to theorise about object representations in infancy (Spelke 1990; Baillargeon 1995; Carey 2009). Pylyshyn (2001, 129) draws an explicit connection between the philosophical literature on mental files and the notion of object files to emphasize the purely causal relation between object files and their referents. Philosophers Murez and Recanati (2016) make some important distinctions between Pylyshyn’s notion of object files and mental files by underlying the conceptual nature of the latter. They emphasise that mental files can store qualitative information about their objects (and in this sense they can be construed as conceptual representations of individual objects). However, this qualitative information is not used to fix the referent of the mental file. Information can be updated, retrieved and deleted without changing the referent of the file. It is in this sense that we say that mental files represent concrete objects as individuals rather than as the possessors of properties. Perner et al. (2015) explicitly appeal to mental files to develop a cognitive theory of belief representation in infancy.
- 10.
This happens, for instance, when a file involves an expression that appears to be a proper name. The head of department says “room 425 is too small to host the admin office”. A singular term like “Room 425” has its own individual mental file, and so does each item described in the dossier. In fact, there can be a hierarchy of files. But the files contain only information (predicates) about the objects. They don’t contain singular terms. They are cognitive representations in the mind that stand for objects in reality, if there are any. They are associated with singular terms without including them.
- 11.
Fregean senses are usually interpreted as descriptive modes of presentation of objects, i.e. descriptive conditions such as “the morning star”, that are parts of the propositional content of thoughts. For example, the content of the thought that “Phosphorus will rise in the morning” will be that the morning star will rise in the morning. Mental files, however, are not necessarily interpreted as descriptive modes of presentation that enter into the propositional content of thoughts. See, e.g., Recanati (2012) for a critical discussion of the relation between mental files and descriptivism.
- 12.
In this section we use “pretend” and “imagine” in their non-technical sense, which is broader than the technical sense introduced in Sect. 10.2.
- 13.
See Slutkin’s (2016). Thanks to David Kinney for telling us about this case.
- 14.
It’s worth noting here that we take the model’s representational content to be the result of imputing the Q 1, …, Q m to T. this representational content is distinct from the model-content itself in so far as the latter concerns claims about target systems whereas the former concern claims about, or pretend about, the model systems themselves.
- 15.
A difference is that G becomes obsolete in concrete models because the material object itself generates the model truths. When using the Phillips-Newlyn machine, we don’t use principles of generation to find out how the economy behaves; we let the machine run!
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Salis, F., Frigg, R., Nguyen, J. (2020). Models and Denotation. In: Falguera, J.L., Martínez-Vidal, C. (eds) Abstract Objects. Synthese Library, vol 422. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38242-1_10
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