Structuralist Models, Idealization, and Approximation

Abstract

For many decades since the constitution of philosophy of science as a more or less autonomous discipline at the beginning of this century, philosophers of science had not paid much attention to the essentially approximative nature of empirical science, i.e. to the fact that there is no such thing as an exact empirical theory (unless it is completely trivial) . This fact was mostly seen as a rather unimportant, accidental feature of empirical knowledge a kind of “noise” we could forget about when trying to unveil the essential structure of science. Since the mid seventies this evaluation of inaccuracy in science has gradually changed. Philosophers of science of different schools and using different methods have become increasingly concerned with the issue, quite independently of their idiosyncratic epistemological views. In particular, two notions have become the focus of much attention: idealization and approximation. They are seen as quite central for an adequate explication of inaccuracy in science.