Abstract
Scientific models occupy centre stage in scientific practice. Correspondingly, in recent literature in the philosophy of science, scientific models have been a focus of research. However, little attention has been paid so far to the ontology of scientific models. In this essay, I attempt to clarify the issues involved in formulating an informatively rich ontology of scientific models. Although no full-blown theory—containing all ontological issues involved—is provided, I make several distinctions and point to several characteristic properties exhibited by scientific models that are relevant for individuating scientific models.
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Notes
This claim is not accepted by all philosophers working on scientific representation. In my currently unpublished manuscript “In Defence of Pragmatic Similarity in Scientific Representation”, I show that the criticisms on similarity are unfounded if a pragmatic version of similarity is upheld (Ducheyne, unpublished manuscript).
It is important to note that at this stage a model does not count as a scientific model of its target. Whether a model counts as a scientific model is the thing we want to establish.
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The author is Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Research Foundation (Flanders).
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Ducheyne, S. Towards an Ontology of Scientific Models. Int Ontology Metaphysics 9, 119–127 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12133-008-0026-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12133-008-0026-y