Abstract
Science, we are told, is (or at least aspires to be) a mirror of nature, while art imitates life. If so, both disciplines produce, or hope to produce, representations that reflect the way the mind-independent world is. Scientific representations are supposed to be complete, accurate, precise and distortion-free. Although artistic representations are granted more leeway, they too are supposed to resemble their subjects. Underlying these clichés is the widespread conviction that representations are intentional surrogates for, or replicas of, their objects. If so, a representation should resemble its referent.
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Notes
- 1.
Goodman (1968, 3). Goodman was not able to find the original source for this quotation. Although a number of sources credit Woolf with it, I have found none that knows where in her work it is to be found.
- 2.
This use of “denote” is slightly tendentious, both because denotation is usually restricted to language and because even within language it is usually distinguished from predication. As I use the term, predicates and generic non-verbal representations denote the members of their extensions; see Elgin (1983, 19–35).
- 3.
See Cartwright (1999, 77–104).
- 4.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing this point.
- 5.
This is the position Giere (1999) takes about the relation between a model and its target system.
- 6.
I owe this example to Roman Frigg.
- 7.
See Scanlon (1998, 72–75). I say “assessible by reference to reasons” rather than “supportable by reasons” because an objective judgment may not stand up. If I put forth my judgment as an objective judgment, submit it to a (real or hypothetical) jury of my peers, it is objective, even if my peers repudiate it.
- 8.
For the start of such an account, see Scheffler (1982).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Israel Scheffler, Nancy Nersessian, John Hughes, the participants in the 2006 Workshop on Scientific Representation at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and the Conference “Beyond Mimesis and Nominalism: Representation in Art and Science” in London, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Elgin, C.Z. (2010). Telling Instances. In: Frigg, R., Hunter, M. (eds) Beyond Mimesis and Convention. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 262. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3851-7_1
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