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Resolving and Understanding Differences Between Agent-Based Accounts of Scientific Representation

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Abstract

Agent-based accounts of scientific representation all agree that the representational relationship is constituted by the actions of scientists. Despite this agreement, there are several differences in how agent-based accounts describe scientific representation. In this essay, I argue that these differences do not undercut the compatibility between the accounts. I make my argument by examining the nature of human agency and demonstrating that scientific, representational actions are multiply describable. I then argue that the differences between the accounts are valuable because they help to bring different parts of the representational practices of science into greater focus.

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Notes

  1. Defenses of isomorphism or partial isomorphism are given by Van Fraassen (1980), French and Ladyman (1999), French (2003), Bartels (2006), Bueno and French (2011), among others; defenses of similarity are given by Giere (1988) and Weisberg (2013). For a response to the objections of Suárez (2003) and Frigg (2006), see Chakravartty (2010), Bueno and French (2011) and Toon (2012).

  2. Suárez offers further details about his Inferential Account in his (2010) and (2015).

  3. N. B. Suárez uses the term “source” where I use the term “vehicle”.

  4. Of course, this is not to suggest that mental states play no role whatsoever, but rather that representation will not be reduced entirely to such a state. See Boesch (2017b).

  5. Anscombe acknowledges that “there are a large number of X’s, in the imagined case, for which we can readily suppose that the answer to the question ‘Why are you X-ing?’ falls within the range” (Anscombe 2000, 38).

  6. It is possible that the description of D is subject to the same features of multiple describability as I discuss it here, but I have decided to keep it the same in this case because Anscombe argues that there is a certain primacy or importance to the final description in a series, and so it may not be quite as interchangeable as others (Anscombe 2000, 46).

  7. My rendering of the ‘Why?’ questions for Hughes’s account makes it such that the denotational action does not function directly in the means-end structuring, hence I begin with an answer about demonstration. Instead, the use of the model as a stand-in is implied by the other features. That is to say, by demonstrating features that hold of the model and showing how they can be interpreted to hold of the target, the agent is thereby using the model as a stand-in.

  8. This paper has been substantively revised thanks to several helpful comments from Tarja Knuuttila, Mauricio Suárez, Michael Dickson, Jennifer Frey, and from two anonymous reviewers.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Tarja Knuuttila, Michael Dickson, Mauricio Suárez, Jennifer Frey, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. I am grateful for helpful comments from audiences at the Three Rivers Philosophy Conference in 2015 and the South Carolina Society for Philosophy Conference in 2015, where earlier versions of this paper were presented.

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  1. Department of Humanities, Morningside College, 1501 Morningside Ave., Charles City Hall #104, Sioux City, IA, 51106, USA

    Brandon Boesch

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Boesch, B. Resolving and Understanding Differences Between Agent-Based Accounts of Scientific Representation. J Gen Philos Sci 50, 195–213 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-019-09442-0

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