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Anchoring fictional models

Adam Toon: Models as make-believe. Plagrave-Macmillan, 2012

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Notes

  1. The target, according Weisberg, isn’t a portion of the world, as such. It is a selective description of it. Thus, the similarity relations in question do not hold between a model and the world per se, but between the model a representation of the world (what is sometimes called a model of data—Suppes 1960).

  2. Weisberg aims his critique at an unpublished paper by myself, which defends a view broadly similar to Toon’s.

  3. It is no coincidence that Weisberg, one of the leading advocates of the indirect view, begins his book with a detailed analogy between a hydraulic Model of the San Francisco Bay and the Lotka-Volterra equations. The analogy motivates and informs his treatment of mathematical models as objects of sorts.

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  1. The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Jerusalem, Israel

    Arnon Levy

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  1. Arnon Levy
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Correspondence to Arnon Levy.

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Levy, A. Anchoring fictional models. Biol Philos 28, 693–701 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-013-9370-6

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