Abstract
Making sense of why something succeeded or failed is central to scientific practice: it provides an interpretation of what happened, i.e. an hypothesized explanation for the results, that informs scientists’ deliberations over their next steps. In philosophy, the realism debate has dominated the project of making sense of scientists’ success and failure claims, restricting its focus to whether truth or reliability best explain science’s most secure successes. Our aim, in contrast, will be to expand and advance the practice-oriented project sketched by Arthur Fine in his work on the Natural Ontological Attitude. An important obstacle to articulating a positive program, we suggest, has been overlooking how scientists adopt standardized rules and procedures in order to define and operationalize meanings for success and failure relative to their situated goals. To help fill this gap, we introduce two new ideas, design specifications and track records, and show how they advance our ability to make sense of scientific modeling practices while maintaining a deflationary stance toward the realism debate.
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Notes
The Shaky Game was first published in 1986, with a second edition in 1996, but our citations will refer to the latest 2009 version.
He also informally credits Micky Forbes as a co-creator of the idea.
In this case the framework applies to other approaches besides artificial viscosity for addressing the distortions shocks introduce into discrete lattice simulations.
In a later paper Winsberg and Mirza characterize the original argument as against realism but not necessarily for anti-realism (Winsberg and Mirza 2018).
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Acknowledgments
Our special thanks to Elihu Gerson for helpful discussion across the years. This paper has also benefitted substantially from constructive referee comments on this and prior versions.
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Sterner, B., DiTeresi, C. Making coherent senses of success in scientific modeling. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 11, 24 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-00336-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-00336-3