Scientific Understanding And Representation
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Scientific Understanding and Representation
This volume assembles cutting-edge scholarship on scientific understanding, scientific representation, and their delicate interplay. Featuring several articles in an engaging ‘critical conversation’ format, the volume integrates discussions about understanding and representation with perennial issues in the philosophy of science, including the nature of scientific knowledge, idealizations, scientific realism, scientific inference, and scientific progress. In the philosophy of science, questions of scientific understanding and scientific representation have only recently been put in dialogue with each other. The chapters advance these discussions from a variety of fresh perspectives. They range from case studies in physics, chemistry, and neuroscience to the representational challenges of machine learning models; from special forms of representation such as maps and topological models to the relation between understanding and explanation; and from the role of idealized representations to the role of representation and understanding in scientific progress. Scientific Understanding and Representation will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, philosophy of mathematics, and epistemology.
Models
Author: Marx W. Wartofsky
language: en
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Release Date: 2012-12-06
Marx Wartofsky has been working for many years within an unusual confluence of philosophical problems. He brings to these intersecting problems his comprehensive intelligence, at once imaginative and rigorous, analytic and historical. He is a philosopher's philosopher, but also Everyman's. Wartofsky is philosopher of the natural and the social sciences, of perception, esthetics and the creative arts, of the 18th century French and the 19th century Germans, of politics and morality, ofthe methods and morals of medicine, and it is plain, of all human existence. To a colleague, he seems Jack-of-all-philosophical-trades, and master of them too. The reader soon will learn that Wartofsky is a genial, lucid and relaxed philosophical companion, deeply serious but without noticeable anxiety. I need not highlight these selected epistemological papers gathered as, and about, Models, since Wartofsky's own introductory remarks are helpful and stimulating in that respect. I need only, after 21 years of friendship and collaboration with him, warn the reader to beware of how profound and provocative these papers will show themselves to be beneath their good-humored and swiftly-flowing surface. And I must publicly note the pleasure with which I welcome Marx Wartofsky's volume to our Boston Studies. Boston University R.S.C. Center for the Philosophy and History of Science September 1979 vii TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITORIAL PREFACE VII xi AC K NOWLEDGEMENTS xiii INTRODUCTION The Model Muddle: Proposals for an Immodest Realism 1.
Scientific Representation
Bas C. van Fraassen presents an original exploration of how we represent the world. Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. Scientific Representation begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the Renaissance, and the geometric styles of modelling in modern physics. Starting with Mach's and Poincaré's analyses of measurement and the 'problem of coordination', van Fraassen then presents a view of measurement outcomes as representations. With respect to the theories of contemporary science he defends an empiricist structuralist version of the 'picture theory' of science, through an inquiry into the paradoxes that came to light in twentieth-century philosophies of science. Van Fraassen concludes with an analysis of the complex relationship between appearance and reality in the scientific world-picture.