Abstract
Cartwright (How the laws of physics lie. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983) said: “A model is a work of fiction”. Since then a good deal of philosophical literature has advocated that scientific models are fictional objects. In this contribution we will try to show that Cartwright’s dictum is correct, but that scientific models are not fictional objects. We distinguish between models as abstract objects and the fictional systems that they determine, where the latter can be in partial correspondence with parcels of the world. We also contrast our view with other recent approaches for scientific models, among them Contessa’s dualist view as well as Frigg’s, Toon’s and Levy’s accounts based on Walton’s Pretence Theory.
This contribution has received financial support from FEDER/Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the project FFI2013-41415-P, and from FEDER/Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities–State Research Agency under the project FFI2017-82534-P. This article also contributes to the project PICT-2014-1741 with financial support from ANPCyT, Argentina.
The order of the authors has no relevance. de Donato-Rodríguez, Xavier and Falguera, José L. have been contributed equally to the elaboration of this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
In a later work, Cartwright (1999, ch. 2) invites us to analyse SMs as fables.
- 2.
See Godfrey-Smith (2009) for a study of the analogy between fictional systems and fictional characters and for a revision of recent contributions to the analysis of SMs.
- 3.
Walton (1990) and Everett (2013), among others, provide some important fictionalist accounts on fictional discourse, such as that given by literary contexts. Besides fictionalist approaches on fictional characters, there are fictionalist views on putative abstract entities from mathematics, semantics and so on (e.g., numbers, concepts, propositions, etc.) that reject the existence of such entities. In the case of mathematical discourse, fictionalism has found contenders such as Field (1980), Balaguer (1998), Melia (2000), or Yablo (2001).
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
In fact, Frigg (2010a, b) presents what he calls a model-system as a fictional object (or imaginary object). And although a model-system is, in some sense, an SM, he finally adopts an imaginative answer regarding what a scientific model is as he defends the idea that every component, and every combination of components, which he distinguishes in a general picture of scientific modeling (excluded the target-system), can be called the model.
- 7.
Levy (2012) formerly endorsed a direct view too (according to him, there are no intermediate model systems), and he also articulated his view on how scientific modelling works by appealing to Walton’s make-believe theory. In a subsequent paper, Levy (2015) defends a fictionalist position as well, while attempting to improve it by appealing to Yablo’s notion of partial truth.
Our arguments against Levy’s position do not differ greatly from those we have against Toon’s view.
- 8.
Contessa speaks of an SM as an imaginary object solely for what he calls ‘fictional models’. See Sect. 8.3 below.
- 9.
For Contessa, SM and fictional characters are, both, imaginary objects, and these must to be considered as abstract objects in order to account for the semantic assessment of sentences about these kind of entities (as we shall see below). The actual (or real) world is viewed as consisting of both concrete and abstract entities for someone adopting a realist approach regarding abstract entities.
- 10.
Strictly, Contessa has proposed the dual ontological nature for the kind of SM that he calls “fictional models”.
- 11.
Walton himself would not necessarily be antirealist in relation to numbers or propositions.
- 12.
We omit Godfrey-Smith’s (2006) approach from consideration in this paper, as part of our criticism is also applicable to this perspective. According to his view, SMs are imaginary entities that would be concrete if they existed. On the other hand, and as Morrison (2015, 98) reminds us, even if we accepted that it could be possible for SMs to be concrete, this would not affect their condition of being idealisations of their targets.
- 13.
We should recall that, in the direct approach, a model description, equation, or material entity helps to extract imaginings to represent aspects of the world (a real entity which is the purported target of our modelling). Only with difficulty can this approach account for the case in which purported targets do not exist.
- 14.
Here we speak of the relation of determination in a semantic sense, in order to establish what an intensional object is directly about. So, in the case of a fictional content it is directly about a specific fictional object–i.e., a fictional character, a fictional place, a fictional kind, a fictional situation, etc.
- 15.
In this sense, we should distinguish the case in which a novelist conceives some fictional scientist formulating a new SM–or postulating a new theoretical entity–(where the scientist and the SM construed by him–or the theoretical entity in question–are fictional in the sense that they exist thanks to the novel and its creation by the novelist) from the case in which an actual scientist construes a new SM–or postulates a new theoretical entity–to account for a certain (set of) phenomenon(a). The SM in the novel–let us suppose that it is even conveniently detailed–is not truly a SM, i.e. conceived for scientific purposes, but just because of the plot of the novel. Nevertheless, it will be easy to check that our approach can obviously account for these fictional cases as abstract artifacts, because the conceived SM in a novel is determined by that novel in a similar way to a character in a work of fiction (for instance, the Sherlock-Holmes-character of Doyle’s stories or the Hobbit-kind in Tolkien’s novels). Only in the case where a SM serves for actual scientific purposes and it has been construed by an actual scientist or group of scientists, we are facing an intensional entity that conveniently tries to satisfy scientific standards and that is construed with the purpose of understanding the real concrete world. This proposal is also accounting for cases in which scientists don’t believe that the SM stands for a real concrete system (or systems), as for example with the Bohr’s atom model nowadays. (The authors of this article want to thank an anonymous referee for his/her helpful comments at this point that lead us to clarify this issue.)
- 16.
We assume that an SM can have more than an intended target system; for example, Bohr’s atomic model has many atoms (especially of hydrogen) as its target systems.
- 17.
Here we use “fictional world” in an informal way, accepting that they can be incoherent or incomplete. According to Zalta (1983, 1988), it would be better to call them “fictional situations”, because, in his Abstract Object Theory a world is consistent and complete. Zalta himself (see Zalta 2000) makes a useful comparison between Walton’s Pretence Theory and his Axiomatic Abstract Objects Theory and considers the notion of story (in his technical sense) as analogous to the notion of a world of fiction (stories are kinds of situations–incomplete possible worlds–that are authored by concrete entities (the writer(s) or the author(s) of the story)).
- 18.
These comments are inspired by Thomasson (1999), specifically her views on abstract artifacts and their dependences.
- 19.
J. Díez (at the end of his contribution to this volume) says: “But, what abstract object can it be? Of course, the concept phlogiston exists, as the meaning of the word in the theory or model-description; but to claim that the piece in the model stands-for/determines the concept is odd.” And later he says: “But some accounts commit with stronger abstractionism, either accepting possible/fictional systems as abstract entities determined by the model as a whole (cf. Donato and Falguera, this volume), or abstract objects as entities stood for parts of the model that aim but “fail” to stand for the aimed concrete entity (caloric, ether, etc.), or both.” These comments are a little bit confusing. Attending to them, in the following we try to clarify our position.
First, we consider that the complex intensional entity expressed by some (different) material support(s) for a scientific model exists, and that this entity is the scientific model. If Díez accepts that concepts as “PHLOGISTON” exists, it is difficult to understand that he doesn’t accept complex intensional entities as those expressed by material supports for scientific models. And if he were assuming those entities, why they are not part of his account of scientific modelling?
Second, other researchers, advocating for the make-believe account for scientific models (see the contribution of Salis-Frigg-Nguyen in this volume), are assuming now the necessity to consider the content (or intension) of the model description, but they are more interested in the internal process of a human subject related to his imaginations than in the intersubjective content. Against them, we are not very interested in the subjective imaginations (though we don’t reject them), because it entails to recuperate the psychologist approach to epistemic–in fact, to ontoepistemosemantics–issues, superseded at the beginning of the twentieth century by several authors within the analytic philosophy (thanks to Frege, Carnap, and Popper, among others).
Third, we do not say that the piece in the model stands for the concept (even accepting that the intensional entity which is expressed by that piece is a complex concept, something which we accept). Obviously, that claim is odd, but it is not our claim. It is odd because the verb “to stand for” seems to require the previous existence of the entity which is stood for a piece of material support (as representamen), but in the case of a scientific model–understood as an intensional entity–there is no such entity prior to the first piece of material support (as representamen) for the model which is created by its author(s). For us, the scientific model (as an intensional entity expressed by some piece of material support) determines a fictional system. This latter claim is not odd; it is the usual way to establish the relationship between a representamen (especially when it is a linguistic expression) and its content or intension. Only when a corresponding piece of material support expresses a scientific model with an existing target in our actual world it makes sense to speak of “standing for” in order to say that the piece of material support [that expresses a scientific model (as intensional entity)] stands for the corresponding target.
Fourth, in any case, Díez gives a better characterization of our view in the footnote 12 of his contribution to this volume.
- 20.
In any case, though we assume that these structures have notions as components, they do not necessarily have to be considered as Fregean propositions (or groups of Fregean propositions).
- 21.
- 22.
This is something that could be captured by Zalta’s Abstract Objects Theory (ZAOT), in which an abstract object is determined by a group of properties, and these properties constitute the object in question. Abstract objects are introduced in Zalta’s theory by means of a comprehension axiom scheme which establishes that, for a given condition (or complex of conditions) φ, there is an abstract object that has (encodes) exactly those properties (see Zalta 1983 and 1988). In de Donato and Falguera (2016), we make use of ZAOT in order to present an account of scientific theories, ideal objects and the referents of theoretical terms as special kinds of abstract objects (or more particularly, making use also of Thomasson’s ideas, abstract artifacts).
- 23.
See §3 for sentences (1) and (2).
- 24.
Toon (2012) adopts a similar position in relation to fictional and metafictional statements.
- 25.
In the case of intrafictional statements, the complete operator would be “it is fictional in the work (novel) that…”.
- 26.
It should be kept in mind that an intrafictional statement could always be asserted as a true metafictional statement. Or, in other way, “p, when uttered as a metafictional claim, is true iff p is fictional when uttered as an intrafictional claim” (Frigg 2010a, 263).
- 27.
They can also compare two fictional objects (from different works).
- 28.
Remember that in a fictionalist approach, fictions are nothing; they do not have any kind of existence.
- 29.
Allan Pinkerton (1819–1884) was the real detective who was reputed to have discovered a plot to murder A. Lincoln.
- 30.
Contrast this with the comparison between Holmes and Pinkerton in terms of their relative cleverness, which is made in the story. It is far from obvious how a contender of the Pretence View can manage these cases and explain the difference between them. See about this the discussion in Zalta (2000, § 5).
- 31.
- 32.
- 33.
Walton’s theory is indeed antirealist regarding the issue of fictional entities, though he does not have the same problems with other alleged abstract objects (such as numbers or propositions). See Walton (1990, 390).
- 34.
Recall here our note 4 above.
- 35.
We leave the analysis and criticism of Levy’s (2015) new account in terms of Yablo’s partial truth for a future paper.
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de Donato-Rodríguez, X., Falguera, J.L. (2020). The Nature of Scientific Models: Abstract Artifacts That Determine Fictional Systems. In: Falguera, J.L., Martínez-Vidal, C. (eds) Abstract Objects. Synthese Library, vol 422. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38242-1_8
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