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...
