Abstract
Realists regarding scientific knowledge-those who think that our best scientific representations truly describe both observable and unobservable aspects of the world-have special need of a notion of approximate truth. Since theories and models are rarely considered true simpliciter, the realist requires some means of making sense of the claim that they may be false and yet close to the truth, and increasingly so over time. In this paper, I suggest that traditional approaches to approximate truth pay insufficient attention to an important distinction between two features of scientific knowledge, and that for each of them, analogies between representational practices in the sciences and in art prove useful to understanding how this situation can be remedied. First, I outline two distinct ways in which representations deviate from the truth, commonly referred to as "abstraction" and "idealization". Second, I argue that these practices exemplify different conventions of representation, and that for each, the conditions of approximation relevant to explicating the concept of approximate truth must be understood differently. The concept is thus heterogeneous; approximate truth is a virtue that is multiply realized, relative to different contexts of representation. This understanding is facilitated, I suggest, by considering the distinction between realistic and non-realistic representation in art.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
McMullin (1985, 259) contains a nice discussion of this and similar cases.
- 5.
Interesting questions naturally arise here concerning whether, in the context of scientific (if not artistic) representations, distortions can be so severe as to sever relations of reference, whether in such cases it is reasonable to speak of idealizations of target systems at all, and so on. For some thoughts on these issues, see my (2009).
- 6.
See Suarez (2003, 236), for a discussion of this painting and associated literature.
- 7.
For an insightful discussion of the variety of interpretation and the literature surrounding it, see Bryan-Wilson (2003).
- 8.
I owe thanks to Martin Thomson-Jones and Juha Saatsi for illustrating this point with some of the following examples.
- 9.
For a more leisurely route to this conclusion, see Chakravartty (2007, Part III).
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Acknowledgments
My thinking about these topics has benefited immensely from discussions with audiences at the Tilburg Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, the “Beyond Mimesis and Nominalism: Representation in Art and Science” conference in London, the National University of Singapore, York University, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and University of Zurich. I am grateful to all the participants, and especially thankful for the detailed input of Roman Frigg, Matthew C. Hunter, and two anonymous referees for this volume.
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Chakravartty, A. (2010). Truth and Representation in Science: Two Inspirations from Art. In: Frigg, R., Hunter, M. (eds) Beyond Mimesis and Convention. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 262. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3851-7_3
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