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Credibility, Idealisation, and Model Building: An Inferential Approach

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Abstract

In this article we defend the inferential view of scientific models and idealisation. Models are seen as “inferential prostheses” (instruments for surrogative reasoning) construed by means of an idealisation-concretisation process, which we essentially understand as a kind of counterfactual deformation procedure (also analysed in inferential terms). The value of scientific representation is understood in terms not only of the success of the inferential outcomes arrived at with its help, but also of the heuristic power of representation and their capacity to correct and improve our models. This provides us with an argument against Sugden’s account of credible models: the likelihood or realisticness (their “credibility”) is not always a good measure of their acceptability. As opposed to “credibility” we propose the notion of “enlightening”, which is the capacity of giving us understanding in the sense of an inferential ability.

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Notes

  1. It is also important to note that inferential norms include not only such licensing logical, formally valid inferences, but also material inferences (e.g., from “it’s raining” to “the floor will be wet”). The inferential role Grüne-Yanoff (2009, Sect. 2) attached to the interpretational component of models would refer precisely to such material inferences.

  2. In this sense, mathematical models also allow us to learn about (mathematical) theories, in the sense of helping to actually derive consequences from the axioms of the latter (cf. Morgan and Morrison 1999).

  3. This is in line with the “methodological” approach to the concept of verisimilitude that has been defended elsewhere by one of us, in which “truthlikeness” is taken as the “epistemic utility function” of scientists and, being a kind of utility, it is assumed to be something that can be subjectively experienced by the relevant agents. Epistemically speaking, truthlikeness (or the appearance of being closer to the truth), is hence, a more primitive concept than truth (Cf. Zamora Bonilla 1992, 2000).

  4. The intuitive idea is that a statement holding in ¼ of all possible worlds will have a degree of contingency of ¾. Later he interprets this in terms similar to those of David Lewis. The degree of contingency of a statement S in the actual world is the maximum degree of closeness of the worlds in which S does not hold with respect to the actual world.

  5. Adapted from Arroyo and de Donato, The structure of idealization in biological theories, unpublished manuscript.

  6. This may be related to Mäki’s idea (this issue) that isolation could be seen as a linear process, at one end of which is a real system, and at the other an abstract system; what we are adding to this view is that the different steps of the isolation process involve different kinds of modalities.

  7. If inferential moves are viewed as a kind of cognitive operation of the mind, it is possible to distinguish two different systems of reasoning (cf. Carruthers 2006, p. 254 ff): one operates in parallel, usually in a quick, automatic and unconscious way, and is constituted of innate mechanisms, and the other supervenes on the operation of the first, usually through conscious inner speech, and depends on culturally transmitted combinations of simpler inferential norms.

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Correspondence to Jesús Zamora Bonilla.

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de Donato Rodríguez, X., Zamora Bonilla, J. Credibility, Idealisation, and Model Building: An Inferential Approach. Erkenn 70, 101–118 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-008-9139-5

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