Abstract
Prima facie, accounts of scientific representation should illuminate how models support justified surrogative reasoning while remaining neutral on the nature of inductive inference. We argue that doing both at once is harder than it first appears. Accounts like “DEKI,” which distinguish justified and unjustified surrogative inferences by appealing to a distinction between derivational and factual correctness, cannot accommodate non-formal, non-rule-based accounts of inference such as John Norton’s material theory of induction. In contrast, a recent expressivist-inferentialist account appears compatible with material inference, but at the cost of abandoning inductive neutrality.
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Notes
We could add a third type, Model-Entry Transitions, that concern inferences that go into the production of the model/map, but such inferences are external to surrogative reasoning proper, so we set them aside.
Even if he himself focuses on inferences he takes to be “deductively valid” (Swoyer 1991, p. 500 n4).
Millson and Risjord (2023b) insist that, even with the derivational-factual correctness distinction, DEKI is unable to distinguish justified from unjustified inferences. For our purposes, we refrain from taking a position on this issue.
For an incompressible fluid the Navier-Stokes equations read as:
$$-\nabla p+\eta {\nabla }^{2}{\textbf{v}}=\rho \frac{\partial {\textbf{v}}}{\partial t}+({\textbf{v}}\cdot \nabla )\rho {\textbf{v}},$$where \(\rho\) is the density, \(\eta\) the viscosity coefficient, and \({\textbf{v}}\) is the velocity of the fluid.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this point.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for pushing us to make this point clearer and for the example of a Bayesian version of KMR.
A way to create the required space is by appealing to a teleological function. Springle’s (2021) analysis of representation may be especially promising, as this analysis suggests that epistemic representations function to enable non-accidentally successful surrogative inferences about a target system.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for encouraging us to make this point explicit.
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Shech, E., Springle, A.A. Inductive neutrality and scientific representation. Synthese 201, 181 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04161-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04161-y