This Element presents a philosophical exploration of the notion of scientific representation. It does so by focussing on an important class of scientific representations, namely scientific models. Models are important in the scientific process because scientists can study a model to discover features of reality. But what does it mean for something to represent something else? This is the question discussed in this Element. The authors begin by disentangling different aspects of the problem of representation and then discuss the dominant accounts in the philosophical literature: the resemblance view and inferentialism. They find them both wanting and submit that their own preferred option, the so-called DEKI account, not only eschews the problems that beset these conceptions, but further provides a comprehensive answer to the question of how scientific representation works. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The essays in this book provide an excellent introduction to the means by which scientists convey their ideas. While diverse in their subject matter, the essays are unified in asserting that scientists compose and use particular representations in contextually organized and contextually sensitive ways, and that these representations - particularly visual displays such as graphs, diagrams, photographs, and drawings - depend for their meaning on the complex activities in which they are situated.The topics include sociological orientations to representational practice, representation and the realist-constructivist controversy, the fixation of evidence, time and documents in researcher interaction, selection and mathematization in the visual documentation of objects in the life sciences, the use of illustrations in texts (E.0. Wilson's Sociobiology, a field guide to the birds), representing practice in cognitive science, the iconography of scientific texts, and semiotic analysis of scientific, representation.The contributors are K. Amann, Ronald Amerine, Françoise Bastide, Jack Bilmes, K. Knorr, Bruno Latour, John Law, Michael Lynch, Greg Meyers, Lucy A. Suchman, Paul Tibbetts, Steve Woolgar, and Steven Yearley.Michael Lynch is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Boston University. Steve Woolgar is at the Centre for Research into Innovation Culture, and Technology at Brunel University, Uxbridge, England

Mathematics plays a central role in much of contemporary science, but philosophers have struggled to understand what this role is or how significant it might be for mathematics and science. In this book Christopher Pincock tackles this perennial question in a new way by asking how mathematics contributes to the success of our best scientific representations. In the first part of the book this question is posed and sharpened using a proposal for how we can determine the content of a scientific representation. Several different sorts of contributions from mathematics are then articulated. Pincock argues that each contribution can be understood as broadly epistemic, so that what mathematics ultimately contributes to science is best connected with our scientific knowledge. In the second part of the book, Pincock critically evaluates alternative approaches to the role of mathematics in science. These include the potential benefits for scientific discovery and scientific explanation. A major focus of this part of the book is the indispensability argument for mathematical platonism. Using the results of part one, Pincock argues that this argument can at best support a weak form of realism about the truth-value of the statements of mathematics. The book concludes with a chapter on pure mathematics and the remaining options for making sense of its interpretation and epistemology. Thoroughly grounded in case studies drawn from scientific practice, this book aims to bring together current debates in both the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science and to demonstrate the philosophical importance of applications of mathematics.

This monograph offers a critical introduction to current theories of how scientific models represent their target systems. Representation is important because it allows scientists to study a model to discover features of reality. The authors provide a map of the conceptual landscape surrounding the issue of scientific representation, arguing that it consists of multiple intertwined problems. They provide an encyclopaedic overview of existing attempts to answer these questions, and they assess their strengths and weaknesses. The book also presents a comprehensive statement of their alternative proposal, the DEKI account of representation, which they have developed over the last few years. They show how the account works in the case of material as well as non-material models; how it accommodates the use of mathematics in scientific modelling; and how it sheds light on the relation between representation in science and art. The issue of representation has generated a sizeable literature, which has been growing fast in particular over the last decade. This makes it hard for novices to get a handle on the topic because so far there is no book-length introduction that would guide them through the discussion. Likewise, researchers may require a comprehensive review that they can refer to for critical evaluations. This book meets the needs of both groups.

A fresh approach to visualization practices in the sciences that considers novel forms of imaging technology and draws on recent theoretical perspectives on representation. Representation in Scientific Practice, published by the MIT Press in 1990, helped coalesce a long-standing interest in scientific visualization among historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science and remains a touchstone for current investigations in science and technology studies. This volume revisits the topic, taking into account both the changing conceptual landscape of STS and the emergence of new imaging technologies in scientific practice. It offers cutting-edge research on a broad array of fields that study information as well as short reflections on the evolution of the field by leading scholars, including some of the contributors to the 1990 volume. The essays consider the ways in which viewing experiences are crafted in the digital era; the embodied nature of work with digital technologies; the constitutive role of materials and technologies—from chalkboards to brain scans—in the production of new scientific knowledge; the metaphors and images mobilized by communities of practice; and the status and significance of scientific imagery in professional and popular culture. Contributors Morana Alač, Michael Barany, Anne Beaulieu, Annamaria Carusi, Catelijne Coopmans, Lorraine Daston, Sarah de Rijcke, Joseph Dumit, Emma Frow, Yann Giraud, Aud Sissel Hoel, Martin Kemp, Bruno Latour, John Law, Michael Lynch, Donald MacKenzie, Cyrus Mody, Natasha Myers, Rachel Prentice, Arie Rip, Martin Ruivenkamp, Lucy Suchman, Janet Vertesi, Steve Woolgar

Our thoughts are meaningful. We think about things in the outside world; how can that be so? This is one of the deepest questions in contemporary philosophy. Ever since the 'cognitive revolution', states with meaning-mental representations-have been the key explanatory construct of the cognitive sciences. But there is still no widely accepted theory of how mental representations get their meaning. Powerful new methods in cognitive neuroscience can now reveal information processing in the brain in unprecedented detail. They show how the brain performs complex calculations on neural representations. Drawing on this cutting-edge research, Nicholas Shea uses a series of case studies from the cognitive sciences to develop a naturalistic account of the nature of mental representation. His approach is distinctive in focusing firmly on the 'subpersonal' representations that pervade so much of cognitive science. The diversity and depth of the case studies, illustrated by numerous figures, make this book unlike any previous treatment. It is important reading for philosophers of psychology and philosophers of mind, and of considerable interest to researchers throughout the cognitive sciences.

Marx Wartofsky has been working for many years within an unusual confluence of philosophical problems. He brings to these intersecting problems his comprehensive intelligence, at once imaginative and rigorous, analytic and historical. He is a philosopher's philosopher, but also Everyman's. Wartofsky is philosopher of the natural and the social sciences, of perception, esthetics and the creative arts, of the 18th century French and the 19th century Germans, of politics and morality, ofthe methods and morals of medicine, and it is plain, of all human existence. To a colleague, he seems Jack-of-all-philosophical-trades, and master of them too. The reader soon will learn that Wartofsky is a genial, lucid and relaxed philosophical companion, deeply serious but without noticeable anxiety. I need not highlight these selected epistemological papers gathered as, and about, Models, since Wartofsky's own introductory remarks are helpful and stimulating in that respect. I need only, after 21 years of friendship and collaboration with him, warn the reader to beware of how profound and provocative these papers will show themselves to be beneath their good-humored and swiftly-flowing surface. And I must publicly note the pleasure with which I welcome Marx Wartofsky's volume to our Boston Studies. Boston University R.S.C. Center for the Philosophy and History of Science September 1979 vii TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITORIAL PREFACE VII xi AC K NOWLEDGEMENTS xiii INTRODUCTION The Model Muddle: Proposals for an Immodest Realism 1.

Mathematics plays a central role in much of contemporary science, but philosophers have struggled to understand what this role is or how significant it might be for mathematics and science. Pincock tackles this perennial question by asking how mathematics contributes to the success of our best scientific representations.

Bas C. van Fraassen presents an original exploration of how we represent the world. Science represents natural phenomena by means of theories, as well as in many concrete ways by such means as pictures, graphs, table-top models, and computer simulations. Scientific Representation begins with an inquiry into the nature of representation in general, drawing on such diverse sources as Plato's dialogues, the development of perspectival drawing in the Renaissance, and the geometric styles of modelling in modern physics. Starting with Mach's and Poincaré's analyses of measurement and the 'problem of coordination', van Fraassen then presents a view of measurement outcomes as representations. With respect to the theories of contemporary science he defends an empiricist structuralist version of the 'picture theory' of science, through an inquiry into the paradoxes that came to light in twentieth-century philosophies of science. Van Fraassen concludes with an analysis of the complex relationship between appearance and reality in the scientific world-picture.

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