Year: 2015
Type: dissertation
Abstract: In this dissertation, I define epistemic representations to be tools for gaining information about aspects of the target systems they represent, which I call as phenomena of interest. I ask: in virtue of what is one vehicle of representation, rather than another, selected when the user's aim is to learn about such a phenomenon? I argue that examining the nature of epistemic representation promises to be more fruitful than the present debate about scientific representation. I look at two sorts of contexts in which epistemic representations are used: those in which little or nothing is known about the phenomenon of interest, and those in which this phenomenon is already relatively well understood. To see how epistemic representations are used in the first sort of context, I examine the histories of the discoveries of protein and DNA structure. I argue that the process of structure determination may be understood as one of successively eliminating possible structures through the consideration and interpretation of pieces of evidence about this structure. I show that consulting stereochemical rules--chemical laws dictating permissible structures--before x-ray diffraction photographs of the molecules was the strategy likeliest to yield the correct structure most efficiently. I argue that the construction of physical molecular models further contributed to the efficiency of this strategy by helping scientists to consider stereochemical rules first and acting as a cognitive aid, enabling the consideration of many such rules at once.When the phenomenon of interest is already fairly well understood, I argue that an epistemic representation is successful to the extent that it contains sufficiently accurate information about the phenomenon and is able to convey it to the user in a way that makes this information readily available to her. A vehicle may qualify as a mere (but not necessarily successful) epistemic representation of its target system only if it is chosen with the aim of faithfully representing the phenomenon of interest. I show that this is a feature that epistemic representation shares with our ordinary notion of interpretation.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Agnes Bolinska
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2566369468