Proto-models, mental models and scientific models

pp. 39-65

in: Tommaso Bertolotti, Patterns of rationality, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

This chapter focuses explicitly on scientific modeling, drawing from some conclusions made explicit in the previous chapter. The interlocutors of my argumentation will be the contemporary philosophical actors of the debate about scientific models, especially advocates of fictionalism (Frigg, Fiction in science, 247–287, 2010b; Suárez, Fictions, inference, and realism, 225–245, 2010), that is the view according to which scientific models are best understood by the same tools used for analyzing literary fictions, and can therefore be described as displaying a fictional nature. I will reject this view by appealing to the biological origins of modeling—described in the previous chapter—and arguing that the construction of scientific models can be conceptualized as an emergence of the transparent, and careful, use of models (still mental—that is neurally objectified—or otherwise distributed representations) made by scientists, which is quantitatively but not qualitatively different than the biological reliance of models displayed by any cognitive system: assessing the instrumental use of some fictional elements does not entail that the whole system should be labeled as "fiction ". Otherwise, to assess the self-aware fictional nature of science would compel us into defining as fictional also the proto-models displayed by animal cognition: the next step would be to advocate a randomized fictional behavior in animals and humans.