21 found
Order:
  1. .Roman Frigg & James Nguyen - 2016
    No categories
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   45 citations  
  2.  45
    Modelling Nature. An Opinionated Introduction to Scientific Representation.Roman Frigg & James Nguyen - 2020 - New York: Springer.
    This monograph offers a critical introduction to current theories of how scientific models represent their target systems. Representation is important because it allows scientists to study a model to discover features of reality. The authors provide a map of the conceptual landscape surrounding the issue of scientific representation, arguing that it consists of multiple intertwined problems. They provide an encyclopaedic overview of existing attempts to answer these questions, and they assess their strengths and weaknesses. The book also presents a comprehensive (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  3. Understanding Philosophy.Michael Hannon & James Nguyen - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    What is the primary intellectual aim of philosophy? The standard view is that philosophy aims to provide true answers to philosophical questions. But if our aim is to settle controversy by answering such questions, our discipline is an embarrassing failure. Moreover, taking philosophy to aim at providing true answers to these questions leads to a variety of puzzles: How do we account for philosophical expertise? How is philosophical progress possible? Why do job search committees not care about the truth or (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  4. The fiction view of models reloaded.Roman Frigg & James Nguyen - 2016 - The Monist 99 (3):225-242.
    In this paper we explore the constraints that our preferred account of scientific representation places on the ontology of scientific models. Pace the Direct Representation view associated with Arnon Levy and Adam Toon we argue that scientific models should be thought of as imagined systems, and clarify the relationship between imagination and representation.
    Direct download (7 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   67 citations  
  5. Scientific representation.Roman Frigg & James Nguyen - 2016 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    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 (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   49 citations  
  6. The turn of the valve: representing with material models.Roman Frigg & James Nguyen - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 8 (2):205-224.
    Many scientific models are representations. Building on Goodman and Elgin’s notion of representation-as we analyse what this claim involves by providing a general definition of what makes something a scientific model, and formulating a novel account of how they represent. We call the result the DEKI account of representation, which offers a complex kind of representation involving an interplay of, denotation, exemplification, keying up of properties, and imputation. Throughout we focus on material models, and we illustrate our claims with the (...)
    Direct download (7 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  7. It’s Not a Game: Accurate Representation with Toy Models.James Nguyen - 2020 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (3):1013-1041.
    Drawing on ‘interpretational’ accounts of scientific representation, I argue that the use of so-called ‘toy models’ provides no particular philosophical puzzle. More specifically; I argue that once one gives up the idea that models are accurate representations of their targets only if they are appropriately similar, then simple and highly idealized models can be accurate in the same way that more complex models can be. Their differences turn on trading precision for generality, but, if they are appropriately interpreted, toy models (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  8.  59
    Mirrors without warnings.Roman Frigg & James Nguyen - 2019 - Synthese 198 (3):2427-2447.
    Veritism, the position that truth is necessary for epistemic acceptability, seems to be in tension with the observation that much of our best science is not, strictly speaking, true when interpreted literally. This generates a paradox: truth is necessary for epistemic acceptability; the claims of science have to be taken literally; much of what science produces is not literally true and yet it is acceptable. We frame Elgin’s project in True Enough as being motivated by, and offering a particular resolution (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  9. Mathematics is not the only language in the book of nature.James Nguyen & Roman Frigg - 2017 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 24):1-22.
    How does mathematics apply to something non-mathematical? We distinguish between a general application problem and a special application problem. A critical examination of the answer that structural mapping accounts offer to the former problem leads us to identify a lacuna in these accounts: they have to presuppose that target systems are structured and yet leave this presupposition unexplained. We propose to fill this gap with an account that attributes structures to targets through structure generating descriptions. These descriptions are physical descriptions (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  10. Scientific Representation and Theoretical Equivalence.James Nguyen - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (5):982-995.
    In this article I connect two debates in the philosophy of science: the questions of scientific representation and both model and theoretical equivalence. I argue that by paying attention to how a model is used to draw inferences about its target system, we can define a notion of theoretical equivalence that turns on whether models license the same claims about the same target systems. I briefly consider the implications of this for two questions that have recently been discussed in the (...)
    Direct download (7 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  11.  46
    Do fictions explain?James Nguyen - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):3219-3244.
    I argue that fictional models, construed as models that misrepresent certain ontological aspects of their target systems, can nevertheless explain why the latter exhibit certain behaviour. They can do this by accurately representing whatever it is that that behaviour counterfactually depends on. However, we should be sufficiently sensitive to different explanatory questions, i.e., ‘why does certain behaviour occur?’ versus ‘why does the counterfactual dependency invoked to answer that question actually hold?’. With this distinction in mind, I argue that whilst fictional (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  12. On the pragmatic equivalence between representing data and phenomena.James Nguyen - 2016 - Philosophy of Science 83 (2):171- 191.
    Van Fraassen argues that data provide the target-end structures required by structuralist accounts of scientific representation. But models represent phenomena not data. Van Fraassen agrees but argues that there is no pragmatic difference between taking a scientific model to accurately represent a physical system and accurately represent data extracted from it. In this article I reconstruct his argument and show that it turns on the false premise that the pragmatic content of acts of representation include doxastic commitments.
    Direct download (9 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  13.  36
    Seven Myths About the Fiction View of Models.Roman Frigg & James Nguyen - 2021 - In Alejandro Cassini & Juan Redmond (eds.), Models and Idealizations in Science: Artifactual and Fictional Approaches. Springer Verlag. pp. 133-157.
    Roman Frigg and James Nguyen present a detailed statement and defense of the fiction view of scientific models, according to which they are akin to the characters and places of literary fiction. They argue that while some of the criticisms this view has attracted raise legitimate points, others are myths. In this chapter, they first identify and then rebut the following seven myths: that the fiction view regards products of science as falsehoods; that the fiction view holds that models are (...)
    No categories
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  14.  41
    Objectivity, Ambiguity, and Theory Choice.James Nguyen & Alexandru Marcoci - 2019 - Erkenntnis 84 (2):343-357.
    Kuhn argued that scientific theory choice is, in some sense, a rational matter, but one that is not fully determined by shared objective scientific virtues like accuracy, simplicity, and scope. Okasha imports Arrow’s impossibility theorem into the context of theory choice to show that rather than not fully determining theory choice, these virtues cannot determine it at all. If Okasha is right, then there is no function (satisfying certain desirable conditions) from ‘preference’ rankings supplied by scientific virtues over competing theories (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  15.  63
    How models represent.James Nguyen - 2016 - Dissertation,
    Scientific models are important, if not the sole, units of science. This thesis addresses the following question: in virtue of what do scientific models represent their target systems? In Part i I motivate the question, and lay out some important desiderata that any successful answer must meet. This provides a novel conceptual framework in which to think about the question of scientific representation. I then argue against Callender and Cohen’s attempt to diffuse the question. In Part ii I investigate the (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  16.  26
    Confidence in Covid-19 models.James Nguyen - 2024 - Synthese 203 (4):1-29.
    Epidemiological models of the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 played an important role in guiding the decisions of policy-makers during the pandemic. Such models provide output projections, in the form of time -series of infections, hospitalisations, and deaths, under various different parameter and scenario assumptions. In this paper I caution against handling these outputs uncritically: raw model-outputs should not be presented as direct projections in contexts where modelling results are required to support policy -decisions. I argue that model uncertainty should be handled (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  17.  67
    The Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration: History, Philosophy, and Culture.Peter Galison, Juliusz Doboszewski, Jamee Elder, Niels C. M. Martens, Abhay Ashtekar, Jonas Enander, Marie Gueguen, Elizabeth A. Kessler, Roberto Lalli, Martin Lesourd, Alexandru Marcoci, Sebastián Murgueitio Ramírez, Priyamvada Natarajan, James Nguyen, Luis Reyes-Galindo, Sophie Ritson, Mike D. Schneider, Emilie Skulberg, Helene Sorgner, Matthew Stanley, Ann C. Thresher, Jeroen Van Dongen, James Owen Weatherall, Jingyi Wu & Adrian Wüthrich - 2023 - Galaxies 11 (1):32.
    This white paper outlines the plans of the History Philosophy Culture Working Group of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.
    No categories
    Direct download (9 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  18.  28
    The limitations of the Arrovian consistency of domains with a fixed preference.James Nguyen - 2019 - Theory and Decision 87 (2):183-199.
    In this paper I investigate the properties of social welfare functions defined on domains where the preferences of one agent remain fixed. Such a domain is a degenerate case of those investigated, and proved Arrow consistent, by Sakai and Shimoji :435–445, 2006). Thus, they admit functions from them to a social preference that satisfy Arrow’s conditions of Weak Pareto, Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives, and Non-dictatorship. However, I prove that according to any function that satisfies these conditions on such a domain, (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  19.  35
    Scientific Rationality by Degrees.Alexandru Marcoci & James Nguyen - 2017 - In Michela Massimi, Jan-Willem Romeijn & Gerhard Schurz (eds.), EPSA15 Selected Papers: The 5th conference of the European Philosophy of Science Association in Düsseldorf. Cham: Springer. pp. 321-333.
    In a recent paper, Okasha imports Arrow’s impossibility theorem into the context of theory choice. He shows that there is no function (satisfying certain desirable conditions) from profiles of preference rankings over competing theories, models or hypotheses provided by scientific virtues to a single all-things-considered ranking. This is a prima facie threat to the rationality of theory choice. In this paper we show this threat relies on an all-or-nothing understanding of scientific rationality and articulate instead a notion of rationality by (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  20.  33
    Judgement aggregation in scientific collaborations: The case for waiving expertise.Alexandru Marcoci & James Nguyen - 2020 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 84:66-74.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  21. Aesthetic cognitivism, experimental shielding, and explanatory reasoning.James Nguyen - 2023 - In Milena Ivanova & Alice Murphy (eds.), The Aesthetics of Scientific Experiments. New York, NY: Routledge.
    No categories
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark