Draft: Scientific Models and Representation

For those interested, I have uploaded the penultimate draft of my entry on scientific models and representation for The Continuum Companion to the Philosophy of Science (edited by fellow blogger Steven French and Juha Saatsi). (You can get a copy of it here)

The piece is meant to be a user-friendly introduction to this very interesting but somewhat baffling topic. As usual, comments (either here or by e-mail) are greatly appreciated.

Draft: Structure and Representation

I finally got around uploading a draft of my my monstruously long two-part paper 'Structure and Representation', which some of you are already familiar with (Part I can be downloaded from here and Part II from here).

In the paper, I defend an (I think rather unorthodox) version of the so-called structuralist account of representation. I'd really appreciate comments (either here or by e-mail) from anyone who finds the time and the courage to go through it, especially since the paper will form the basis for one of the chapters of my book on "scientific" representation, which is now officially under contract with Palgrave Macmillan as part of their new series New Directions in Philosophy of Science edited by Steven French.

SVT: Original and Continuing Motivation

At the recent MS3 meeting, I gave a brief presentation on Pat Suppes contributions to thinking about models. One point is relevant to Contessa’s question about the original arguments in favor of the SVT over the statement view. At least two of the three founders of the SVT, Suppes and Beth (the third was Arthur Burks), were much concerned with the foundations of physics, Suppes with classical mechanics and Beth with quantum theory. They found attempting reconstructions in first (or even second) order logic to be impossibly cumbersome. The physics gets lost in the logic. To be convinced of this, one need only look at Richard Montague’s 1962 first order reconstruction of classical mechanics. [Deterministic Theories. In Formal Philosophy and Selected Papers of Richard Montague, ed. R. H. Thomason, 303-59. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974.] As I remember, one can barely make out F= ma in something like Axiom 24. Set Theory and State Spaces are far more perspicuous than first order formulae. van Fraassen, who was inspired by Beth, had a similar motivation. The general idea of getting the philosophy of science closer to the science has been for me, and I think many others, a major attraction of the SVT, even though the primary interest has been understanding the actual practice of science rather than the foundations of theories.

Bas van Fraassen's Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspectives

As many of you will already know, Bas van Fraassen's new book Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspectives (OUP 2008) has been out for a few months and I highly reccommend it to all of you who haven't read it already.

If you are interested and you would like to have some idea of what the book is about, it looks like a few it'sonlyatheorists have been busy reviewing it lately. So, here is a review of it by Ron Giere, here one by Steven French, and here is one that I've written for NDPR. (If I missed anyone, please let me know!)

Also, Bas has kindly invited me to be one of the contributors to a book symposium on the book that will appear some time next year in Analysis and I'm considering developing some of the points I raise in my review in that piece. So, if you have any comments about my review, please let me know (either commenting on this post or by e-mail).

Models and Fiction

In a forthcoming paper "Models and Fiction", Roman Frigg gives an argument for the view that scientific models are best understood as fictional entities whose metaphysical commitments are “none” (17). I think this argument is a new and important one, but I don’t agree with it. Frigg first considers the view that models are abstract structures. He points out that an abstract mathematical structure, by itself, is not a model because there is nothing about it that ties it to any purported target system. But "in order for it to be true that a target system possesses a particular structure, a more concrete description must be true of the system as well" (5). The problem is that this more concrete description is not a true description of the abstract structure and it is not a true description of the target system either in the case if idealization. So, for these descriptions to do their job of linking the abstract structure to their targets, they must be descriptions of "hypothetical systems", and it is these systems that Frigg argues are the models after all.

My objection to this argument is that there are things besides Frigg’s descriptions that can do the job of linking abstract structures to target systems. A weaker link is a relation of denotation between some parts of the abstract structure and features of the target systems. This, of course, requires some explanation, but a denotation or reference relation, emphasized, e.g. by Hughes, need not involve a concrete description of any hypothetical system.

(Cross-posted with Honest Toil.)