Holistic modeling: an objection to Weisberg’s weighted feature-matching account

Fang, Wei

doi:10.1007/s11229-016-1018-z

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…My point is that GodfreySmith's (2006) account easily allows for fictionalist interpretations (Godfrey-Smith 2009;Frigg 2010;Currie 2016), or at least hardly yields to a robust realist construal. Similarly, Weisberg's work (Weisberg 2007a, b;Weisberg 2013) provides ample room for grappling with the problems of realism, idealisation, similarity and simulation but hardly grounds a robust form of realism (Levy and Currie 2015 among others;Fang 2016).…”

Section: Representation and Realitymentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Thinking Brains and Tinkering with the Scientific Models

Beni

2017

Axiomathes

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The paper aims to provide a detailed assessment of Tim Crane's recent invocation of the notion of scientific models in the way of dealing with the issue of the brain's representational states. In this paper, I assess Crane's proposal under a charitable and a less charitable reading. I argue that Crane's use of scientific models is at best (i.e. under a charitable reading) compatible with his expression of psychological realism. However, Crane's use of model-based strategy by no means underlay, support, or strengthen his psychological realism. Rather, traditional reasons from the metaphysics of mind, acting quite separately from empirical scientific reasons, must be used to support this realism, and Crane has merely removed the threat posed to these metaphysical arguments by the existence of the so-called mereological fallacy in empirical neuroscience. Therefore, while he has saved the neuroscientific language from philosophical attack, he has perhaps even strengthened the divide between neuroscience and philosophy. I conclude the paper by outlining the sketch of a broadbrush scientifically informed strategy for defending psychological realism.

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Section: Representation and Realitymentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Thinking Brains and Tinkering with the Scientific Models

Beni

2017

Axiomathes

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“…To get a sense of the complexity involved, note that a modest contemporary microprocessor houses approximately 4.5 billion transistors, and executes upwards of 140 instructions in parallel.5 The account presented here follows Weisberg's 'weighted feature-matching account' (2012). For recent criticisms and elaborations, seeParker (2015) andFang (2017). Some philosophers distinguish between resemblance and similarity, but here I use the terms interchangeably.…”

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confidence: 99%

Implementation as Resemblance

Curtis-Trudel¹

2021

Philos. of Sci.

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This paper advertises a new account of computational implementation. According to the resemblance account, implementation is a matter of resembling a computational architecture. The resemblance account departs from previous theories by denying that computational architectures are exhausted by their formal, mathematical features. Instead, they are taken to be permeated with causality, spatiotemporality, and other non-mathematical features. I argue that this approach comports well with computer scientific practice, and offers a novel response to so-called triviality arguments. Theories of ImplementationTheories of physical computation address two questions: Q1. What distinguishes physical systems that compute from those that don't? Q2. Among physical computing systems, what distinguishes those that compute the same thing from those that don't?(1) concerns the difference between laptops and calculators on the one hand, and rocks and tables on the other. (2), by contrast, concerns the distinction between one laptop computing dot products and another computing Fourier transforms. An adequate account of physical computation should answer both (Sprevak 2019).Different answers to Q1 and Q2 are possible. I shall be concerned with implementationist theories, which hold that a physical system computes if it implements some computational system, or 'computation', for short. Thus: 2 1 Draft of March 5, 2020. Word count: 4947. 2 What of alternatives to implementationism? On one reading, Piccinini's ( 2015) mechanistic account answers Q1 and Q2 by direct appeal to the notion of a computing mechanism. So construed, the implementation relation plays no part in the mechanistic account. This sort of approach is worth exploring, but is beyond the present scope.

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Modeling in Medicine

Matthewson

2024

Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine

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Holistic modeling: an objection to Weisberg’s weighted feature-matching account

Cited by 5 publications

References 33 publications

On the Thinking Brains and Tinkering with the Scientific Models

On the Thinking Brains and Tinkering with the Scientific Models

Implementation as Resemblance

Modeling in Medicine

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