Abstract
Models are used across all scientific disciplines and come in a variety of different forms and shapes: as phenomenological models, theoretical models, mathematical models, toy models, scale models, etc. This bewildering array of different types of models naturally gives rise to the ontological question ‘What is a model?’, which the present chapter sets out to answer. The genealogy of scientific models can be traced back to the use of mechanical analogies in 19th-century physics, and the first part of this chapter reviews some of the historical debates between, amongst others, Pierre Duhem and Norman R. Campbell. This is followed by a critical summary of the syntactic and semantic views of theories and models, which dominated 20th-century philosophy of science, and by a discussion of the more recent proposal that models are best thought of as fictions. The final section discusses how a shift in attention, from questions of how science can be formalized to questions of scientific practice, poses a challenge also to traditional accounts of scientific models.
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Notes
- 1.
Suárez’s edited volume Fictions in Science [36] has recently sparked renewed interest in fictionalism about scientific models in particular.
- 2.
For a discussion of inconsistent modeling assumptions, not only in the application but also in the construction of models, see [44].
- 3.
For one such defence, see [50].
- 4.
In Sect. 5.5, I shall discuss in detail how some scientific models enable us to gain knowledge by functioning as mediators between different types of user–model–target relations, specifically between ‘embodied’ ways of relating to the world and those that require more specialized interpretive activities (such as ‘reading’ an instrument or manipulating a set of mathematical equations).
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Gelfert, A. (2016). Between Theory and Phenomena: What are Scientific Models?. In: How to Do Science with Models. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27954-1_1
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