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Abstract |
The notion of scientific representation plays a central role in current debates on modeling in the sciences. One or maybe the major epistemic virtue of successful models is their capacity to adequately represent specific phenomena or target systems. According to similarity views of scientific representation, models should be similar to their corresponding targets in order to represent them. In this paper, Suárez’s arguments against similarity views of representation will be scrutinized. The upshot is that the intuition that scientific representation involves similarity is not refuted by the arguments. The arguments do not make the case for the strong claim that similarity between vehicles and targets is neither necessary nor sufficient for scientific representation. Especially, one claim that a similarity view wants to uphold, still, is the following thesis: only if a vehicle is similar to a target in relevant respects and to a specific degree of similarity then the vehicle is a scientific representation of that target.
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Keywords | Models Scientific representation Similarity Isomorphism |
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DOI | 10.1007/s10838-015-9307-7 |
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References found in this work BETA
Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World.Michael Weisberg - 2013 - Oxford University Press.
Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective.B. C. van Fraassen - 2010 - Analysis 70 (3):511-514.
View all 19 references / Add more references
Citations of this work BETA
Modeling Organs with Organs on Chips: Scientific Representation and Engineering Design as Modeling Relations.Michael Poznic - 2016 - Philosophy and Technology 29 (4):357-371.
Factive Inferentialism and the Puzzle of Model-Based Explanation.Philippe Verreault-Julien - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):10039-10057.
Models in Science and Engineering: Imagining, Designing and Evaluating Representations.Michael Poznic - 2017 - Dissertation, Delft University of Technology
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