Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: How do models represent reality? There are two conditions that scientific models must satisfy to be representations of real systems, the aboutness condition and the epistemic condition. In this article, I critically assess the two main fictionalist theories of models as representations, the indirect fiction view and the direct fiction view, with respect to these conditions. And I develop a novel proposal, what I call the ‘new fiction view of models’. On this view, models are akin to fictional stories; they represent real-world phenomena if they stand in a denotation relation with reality; and they enable knowledge of reality via the generation of two main kinds of theoretical hypotheses, model–world comparisons and direct attributions.
DOI: 10.1093/bjps/axz015
Author: Fiora Salis
Institution: University of York
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2937590037