Don’t Blame the Idealizations

Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 44 (1):85-100 (2013)
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Abstract

Idealizing conditions are scapegoats for scientific hypotheses, too often blamed for falsehood better attributed to less obvious sources. But while the tendency to blame idealizations is common among both philosophers of science and scientists themselves, the blame is misplaced. Attention to the nature of idealizing conditions, the content of idealized hypotheses, and scientists’ attitudes toward those hypotheses shows that idealizing conditions are blameless when hypotheses misrepresent. These conditions help to determine the content of idealized hypotheses, and they do so in a way that prevents those hypotheses from being false by virtue of their constituent idealizations

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Nicholaos Jones
University of Alabama, Huntsville

Citations of this work

Idealization and abstraction: refining the distinction.Arnon Levy - 2018 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 24):5855-5872.
What is theoretical progress of science?Juha Saatsi - 2019 - Synthese 196 (2):611-631.

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References found in this work

How the laws of physics lie.Nancy Cartwright - 1983 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Nature's capacities and their measurement.Nancy Cartwright - 1989 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation.Michael Strevens - 2008 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Models in Science (2nd edition).Roman Frigg & Stephan Hartmann - 2021 - The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Truth and truthmakers.D. M. Armstrong - 2004 - New York: Cambridge University Press.

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