Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2016)
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Science provides us with representations of atoms, elementary particles, polymers, populations, genetic trees, economies, rational decisions, aeroplanes, earthquakes, forest fires, irrigation systems, and the world’s climate. It's through these representations that we learn about the world. This entry explores various different accounts of scientific representation, with a particular focus on how scientific models represent their target systems. As philosophers of science are increasingly acknowledging the importance, if not the primacy, of scientific models as representational units of science, it's important to stress that how they represent plays a fundamental role in how we are to answer other questions in the philosophy of science. This entry begins by disentangling ‘the’ problem of scientific representation, before critically evaluating the current options available in the literature.
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References found in this work BETA
Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment.Robert Brandom - 1994 - Harvard University Press.
Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science.Ian Hacking - 1983 - Cambridge University Press.
Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World.Michael Weisberg - 2013 - Oxford University Press.
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Citations of this work BETA
What Theoretical Equivalence Could Not Be.Trevor Teitel - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (12):4119-4149.
On Representational Capacities, with an Application to General Relativity.Samuel C. Fletcher - 2020 - Foundations of Physics 50 (4):228-249.
Why Surplus Structure Is Not Superfluous.Nguyen James, J. Teh Nicholas & Wells Laura - 2020 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (2):665-695.
View all 41 citations / Add more citations
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