Salis, Fiora orcid.org/0000-0001-8258-0587 (2018) Scientific Discovery Through Fictionally Modelling Reality. Topoi. ISSN 0167-7411
Abstract
How do scientific models represent in a way that enables us to discover new truths about reality and draw inferences about it? Contemporary accounts of scientific discovery answer this question by focusing on the cognitive mechanisms involved in the generation of new ideas and concepts in terms of a special sort of reasoning—or model-based reasoning—involving imagery. Alternatively, I argue that answering this question requires that we recognise the crucial role of the propositional imagination in the construction and development of models for the purpose of generating hypotheses that are plausible can- didates for truth. I propose simple fictionalism as a new account of models as Waltonian games of make-believe and suggest that models can lead to genuine scientific discovery when they are used as representations that denote real world phenomena and generate two main kinds of theoretical hypotheses, model-world comparisons and direct attributions.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
Keywords: | Scientific discovery · Scientific models · Scientific representation · Model-based reasoning · Make-believe · Fictionalism · Denotation · Theoretical hypotheses |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of York |
Academic Units: | The University of York > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (York) > Philosophy (York) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Scheme 654034 |
Depositing User: | Dr Fiora Salis |
Date Deposited: | 02 Aug 2018 11:40 |
Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2018 11:40 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9582-0 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Springer |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s11245-018-9582-0 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:134106 |
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