Abstract
In this paper I show how certain requirements must be set on any tenable account of scientific representation, such as the requirement allowing for misrepresentation. I then continue to argue that two leading accounts of scientific representation—the inferential account and the interpretational account—are flawed for they do not satisfy such requirements. Through such criticism, and drawing on an analogy from non-scientific representation, I also sketch the outline of a superior account. In particular, I propose to take epistemic representations to be intentional objects that come with reference, semantic contents and a representational code, and I identify faithful representations as representations that act as guides to ontology.
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Notes
Such theories include mean-field theory, Yang-Lee’s theory, Landau’s approach and renormalization group methods. The discussion here will be non-technical and purely illustrative. For a more accurate and in depth philosophical discussion of scientific accounts of phase transitions see Mainwood (2006, Ch. 3–4). Standard textbooks accounts include, for example, Stanley (1971) and Kadanoff (2000).
To clarify: one might say that ontological guides (or guides to ontology) concern representations (or properties of representations) that provide accurate (or approximately accurate) descriptions. I prefer Sklar (2003) terminology of “ontological guides” because descriptions are linguistic entities, while not all representations (or properties of representations) are linguistic entities. Similarly, we could also talk about ontological guides as representations that resemble the object being represented in some manner. But, again, it is not necessarily the case that accurate representations resemble the object being represented, as is clear from accurate (linguistic) descriptions. This is why the somewhat amorphous terminology of “ontological guides” is better suited for my purposes.
See Shech (2013).
The idea that a tenable theory of representation must allow for misrepresentation is identified also in Stich and Warfield (1994, pp. 6–7) in the context of mental representation and by Frigg (2006, p. 51), Suárez’s (2003) (and also implicitly by Hughes (1997)) in the context of scientific representation.
By “intentional” I mean the concept of intentionality as it is used (roughly) by philosophers of mind, as a kind of “aboutness.” Section 2 elaborates on all the terminology just introduced. “Representational code” and “code” are used interchangeably, and the same goes for “representational contents,” “intentional contents,” “contents,” “semantic contents,” etc.
Recall, the requirements have to do with distinguishing between those aspects of a representation that are mere artifacts and those that play genuine representational roles, as well as distinguishing between misrepresentations and ontological guides. My claim is that the inferential account lacks the former (and, subsequently, also the latter), while the interpretational account lacks the latter.
The distinction can be motivated with the example of using old and outdated, versus new and updated, maps. Both allow for valid surrogative inferences about the terrain, but the new and fully updated map will allow for sound surrogative inferences, while the outdated map will give rise to inferences that are not sound (although some inferences may still be sound).
There is a potential source of confusion here. According to Contessa (2007), “faithful representations” are representations that allow for sound inferences, i.e., true conclusions, to be made about the target. However, the question of whether or not faithful representations provide accurate descriptions that can be used as ontological guides is ignored. This is why I state that faithful representations “might” act as ontological guides. Section 5 elaborates on this issue. There I will argue that we must make a distinction between representations that provide sound inferences, and those that can also act as ontological guides.
This point is not meant to be controversial. I take is as evident that the concept of representation presupposes that something is being represented, and it is in this minimal sense that representations are intentional objects.
I’m setting aside here worries regarding the fact that both Superman and Clark Kent are fictional. I could have equally well used an example with non-fictional persons.
Other authors have discussed similar ideas. Bolinska (2013, p. 224) takes “informativeness” to be what I call a code: “Informativeness is the feature of a vehicle that allows a user to draw conclusions about the target system at all.” However, she then continues to argue that a vehicle is informative if and only if it is constructed with the aim of faithfully representing (i.e., extracting sound inferences about) a target. But this cannot be the case. This should be clear from political caricatures in which the representational vehicle constructed aims at misrepresenting the states of affairs. That is to say, in such caricatures the idea is that the viewer will understand that the representation attributes qualities to its target which the target does not have. See Sect. 5 for more on the issue. Contessa (2007, 55) talks about “scope of representation,” which, on his account, is grounded in an “interpretation.” His account will be discussed in Sects. 4 and 5. Giere (2004, 748) and Teller (2001, 401) at times use the word “relevance” for code. But “relevance” is also used as a criterion for constructing and/or choosing a particular representational vehicle to begin with, so I will not use “relevance” in this way. Instead “code,” as in the “code of representation,” is especially apt to capture the relevant notion of “scope” because of its double meaning. On the one hand, a code, understood as a key, legend or guide, is needed in order to make use of a representational vehicle for surrogative reasoning. On the other hand, understood as a cryptogram or cipher, the code of a representation is not always known and so it must be “deciphered,” so to speak.
In order to alleviate a potential confusion, note that “denotation” is sometimes used restrictively between linguistic entities such as terms and non-linguistic entities such as concrete objects. Here it is used as a labeling or referential relation between any object, linguistic or otherwise, and any other object.
Note that it will not do to try to sneak in the concept of a code through the language of “competent and informed user” (2004, p. 773). It is reasonable to demand that an account of scientific representation per se will say more about how competent and informed users are licensed to make certain inferences and not others. Compare (2007, p. 61) and Bolinska (2013, pp. 225–226).
See footnote 16. I would add, as an anonymous referee notes, that Suárez’s (2010) presentation of his own (2004) inferential account amends for some of the faults identified here. For example, Suárez (2010, 98) takes a different line on “representational force,” emphasizing that it is established by the norms that govern scientific practice, instead of mere convention or stipulation. In this context, the inferential account to scientific representations is more analogous to inferential accounts found in the philosophy of language literature (e.g. Brandom 1994). Clearly, it is beyond the scope of this paper to treat the details of this amended inferential account of scientific representation. However, I will say that from my perspective such inferential approaches, especially in a scientific context, seem like a case of putting the cart before the horse: It is in virtue of the fact that a representational vehicle represents a target that the former can be used to make inferences about the later, not the other way around. That said, a true inferentialist would not be moved by such intuitions, and it would be interesting to see if a thorough and developed inferential account [such as Brandom’s (1994)] can be extended to scientific case studies.
That is to say, the kinks and jumps in graphs a–d in Fig. 1.
To emphasize: such criticism ought to be worrisome for the “key advantage” of Contessa’s account is that “it renders the concept of epistemic representation applicable not only to instances of truthful or accurate representation, but to those of misrepresentation as well,” as is identified, for instance, by Bolinska (2013, p. 222).
A reminder is in order. Recall, we distinguished in Sect. 1 between representations that allow for sound inferences and are ontological guides in the sense that they accurately represent the target, and representations that allow for sound inferences but misrepresent the target in some sense. Phase transitions as discontinuities are an example of the latter, while phase transitions without discontinuities are an example of the former.
For simplicity, I have extracted Contessa’s (2007) talk of functions, and this includes his “Rule 3” (57–58, 61–62). My claims can be easily extended from objects, properties, and relations to include functions as well.
Also see Rule 2 above: the “relation \(nR_k^T \) holds among \(o_i^T ,\ldots , o_n^T\)” where \(o_i^T , \ldots , o_n^T\) are objects in the target (61).
For example, let the vehicle of Fig. 2 be both the vehicle and the target of representation. Adopt an analytic interpretation in which \(A\) in the vehicle denotes \(A\) in the target, \(B\) in the vehicle denotes \(B\) in the target, and so on. Also, let the greater than relation = denote the equality relation \(>\). It will follow from the fact that \(\beta =\gamma =\alpha \) in the vehicle, that \(\beta >\gamma >\alpha \) in the target. This is a valid inference that is not sound. But since the vehicle and the target are identical this is not a case of misrepresentation. How can a vehicle misrepresent a target if the two are identical?! In other words, on this reading [of Contessa’s (2007) account] valid but unsound inferences do not correspond to misrepresentations.
Recall that for Contessa “interpretation” is a term of art. Colloquially, we might say that it is in virtue of an interpretation that a user is able to perform surrogative inferences from vehicle to target so long as the interpretation is determined by the representational contents of the vehicle. See Bolinska (2013, pp. 227–228) who also complains about Contessa’s odd use of the term and appeals to the “ordinary” notion of interpretation to capture the concept of “informativeness” (which for her is a term of art).
A note on the dialectics: Denotation is insufficient for representation. That said, I do not claim that the inferential and interpretational accounts ought to be rejected because they are essentially denotational accounts of representation—they are not. Rather, I first argue that such accounts are flawed because they do not meet the requirements set on a reasonable account of scientific representation. Second, in my effort to diagnose the source of such flaws, it seems to me that the inferential and interpretational accounts—accounts developed partially in reaction to purely denotational approaches (as an anonymous referee emphasizes)—still place too much weight on the notion of denotation.
In order to prevent objections of the kind raised in Butterfield (2011), Callender (2001), Menon and Callender (2013) and Norton (2012) against Batterman (2002, 2005, 2009), note that I am not claiming here that such misrepresentations or idealizations are necessary. Rather, my claim is that there are many instances in which scientists aim at misrepresenting aspects of the world in order to extract sound inferences from a vehicle to a target.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this point.
See footnote 2.
A somewhat lengthy intermission might be called for at this point, especially for those readers familiar with the philosophical literature revolving around phase transitions. As an anonymous referee notes, it is a working assumption of the literature that phase transitions are faithfully represented by a finite-dimensional state space. I have justified this assumption by appealing to the atomic theory of matter, but one could argue that on field theoretic accounts of matter this is simply not the case. If (say) quantum field theory (QFT) is true, then matter is just excitations in quantum fields so that there is a sense in which even a boiling kettle is infinite (and this is true also for local QFT). To me this seems a bit extreme. We take phase transitions to be phenomena that are accounted for by classical statistical mechanics. We do not think about phase transitions as we do about, say, quantum non-locality. While the latter is clearly foreign to the classical world, and arises solely as a quantum effect, the former is not. Moreover, the fact that we can represent phase transitions without appealing to infinite-limit misrepresentations—see footnote 2 for such approaches—seems to confirm the idea that phase transitions ought to be accounted for within a classical world-picture. See Callender (2001) and Menon and Callender (2013) for a defense of the claim that phase transitions are governed by classical statistical mechanics.
As a retort, one might argue that misrepresentations analogous to the ones in the phase transitions case arise also in the context of spontaneous symmetry breaking in QFT. In such a context, it certainly is questionable whether infinite limits correspond to accurate or inaccurate representations. See Earman (2004, pp. 191–192) who discusses the issue and is a proponent of the view wherein infinite limits are not taken to be misrepresentations in the context of QFT. However, even in the QFT setting, he admits, there is room for dispute (because the answer to the question of what is the ontology of QFT is not straightforward, and the subject matter is controversial).
In any case, what is brought to the fore here is an interesting observation to the effect that the identification of representational artifacts versus genuine representational structures, and misrepresentations versus faithful (or accurate) representations, depends on the background theories and auxiliary assumptions that one is dealing with. While finite-dimensional state space representations of systems are faithful representations in the context of theories with a (finite) corpuscular ontology, such representations become misrepresentation when one moves to field theories. From my perspective, this point strengthens one of the general themes of this paper: deciphering a representational code and determining representational contents necessitates both empirical and theoretical investigation, and is part and parcel of the scientific enterprise. This point is emphasized in Sect. 6.
That is to say, that observers undergoing relative inertial motion will disagree on simultaneity judgments regarding spatially separated events.
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Acknowledgments
Parts of this paper were presented at the “Ontology and Methodology” conference at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and at the “Work in Progress” workshop of the graduate students of the History and Philosophy of Science department at University of Pittsburgh. I am grateful to those audiences for stimulating discussions. I would especially like to thank John Norton, David de Bruijn, Michael Miller, Erik Angner, Isabel Ranner, Greg Gadenberger, and two anonymous referees for their excellent insight and comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thank you to Naharin Shech for help with figures. Special thanks also to Ben Jantzen, Deborah Mayo, and Lydia Patton for editing this volume of Synthese.
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Shech, E. Scientific misrepresentation and guides to ontology: the need for representational code and contents. Synthese 192, 3463–3485 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0506-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0506-2