Epistemic representation, informativeness and the aim of faithful representation

Bolinska, Agnes

doi:10.1007/s11229-012-0143-6

Cited by 35 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…xxx If anything, the inferential conception has been criticized for affording too much leeway at this point -see e.g. Bolinska (2013). xxxi As has been argued more extensively in Suárez and Solé (2006) of which the text above is a development and summary.…”

Section: XXVIIImentioning

confidence: 99%

Deflationary representation, inference, and practice

Suárez

2015

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A

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This paper defends the deflationary character of two recent views regarding scientific representation, namely RIG Hughes' DDI model and the inferential conception. It is first argued that these views' deflationism is akin to the homonymous position in discussions regarding the nature of truth. There, we are invited to consider the platitudes that the predicate "true" obeys at the level of practice, disregarding any deeper, or more substantive, account of its nature. More generally, for any concept X, a deflationary approach is then defined in opposition to a substantive approach, where a substantive approach to X is an analysis of X in terms of some property P, or relation R, accounting for and explaining the standard use of X. It then becomes possible to characterize a deflationary view of scientific representation in three distinct senses, namely: a "no-theory" view, a "minimalist" view, and a "use-based" view -in line with three standard deflationary responses in the philosophical literature on truth. It is then argued that both the DDI model and the inferential conception may be suitably understood in any of these three different senses. The application of these deflationary 'hermeneutics' moreover yields significant improvements on the DDI model, which bring it closer to the inferential conception. It is finally argued that what these approaches have in common -the key to any deflationary account of scientific representation -is the denial that scientific representation may be ultimately reduced to any substantive explanatory property of sources, or targets, or their relations.Keywords: Deflationary Representation; models and idealization; deflationary accounts; theories of truth; inference. 2 1. Scientific Representation: The State of Play 'Science represents through its models -and this representational aim is characteristic, or defining, of its model-building activity'. As stated -in this minimal and restricted sense -this is as uncontroversial a claim as one may encounter in contemporary philosophy of science. But what is it that science represents, and how does it do it? These are much harder questions, and there is intense debate nowadays amongst philosophers regarding how best to address them. The various attempts to answer these questions can be distinguished in a number of different ways. In this paper I focus on one particular distinction between what I call 'substantive' and 'deflationary' accounts of representation. The former type claims that representation is some substantive or objective property or relation; the latter, by contrast, 'deflates' the notion of representation by claiming that there is no substantive property or relation at stake. These terms will be defined more fully below. Substantive accounts have traditionally been, implicitly if not explicitly, the norm in much of the discussion of scientific representation. Bas van Fraassen and Ronald Giere have often been thought to defend substantive analyses of representation (as isomorphism and similarity, respectively), alth...

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Section: XXVIIImentioning

confidence: 99%

Deflationary representation, inference, and practice

Suárez

2015

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A

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“…Shech's (2014) and Bolinska's (2013)). Contessa is aware of this problem and illustrates it with the example of a massless string.…”

Section: Inflating Inferentialism: Interpretationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Models and Representation

Frigg

Nguyen

2017

Springer Handbook of Model-Based Science

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“…There is always a risk that in a strict transformation and application of the model the idealized model cannot accommodate certain features of the target domain, while in a rather free application any two things can be regarded as arbitrarily similar (cf. Bolinska 2013 : 220). In order to transfer a model properly, it should achieve articulated awareness of the nature of the objects and relations of the social realm (cf.…”

Section: Transfermentioning

confidence: 99%

How to use fitness landscape models for the analysis of collective decision-making: a case of theory-transfer and its limitations

2019

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There is considerable correspondence between theories and models used in biology and the social sciences. One type of model that is in use in both biology and the social sciences is the fitness landscape model. The properties of the fitness landscape model have been applied rather freely in the social domain. This is partly due to the versatility of the model, but it is also due to the difficulties of transferring a model to another domain. We will demonstrate that in order to transfer the biological fitness landscape model to the social science it needs to be substantially modified. We argue that the syntactic structure of the model can remain unaltered, whilst the semantic dimension requires considerable modification in order to fit the specific phenomena in the social sciences. We will first discuss the origin as well as the basic properties of the model. Subsequently, we will demonstrate the considerations and modifications pertaining to such a transfer by showing how and why we altered the model to analyse collective decision-making processes. We will demonstrate that the properties of the target domain allow for a transfer of the syntactic structure but don’t tolerate the semantic transfer.

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Epistemic representation, informativeness and the aim of faithful representation

Cited by 35 publications

References 11 publications

Deflationary representation, inference, and practice

Deflationary representation, inference, and practice

Models and Representation

How to use fitness landscape models for the analysis of collective decision-making: a case of theory-transfer and its limitations

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