Similarity and Scientific Representation

Fiction and Scientific Representation

Scientific discourse is rife with passages that appear to be ordinary descriptions of systems of interest in a particular discipline. Equally, the pages of textbooks and journals are filled with discussions of the properties and the behavior of those systems. Students of mechanics investigate at length the dynamical properties of a system consisting of two or three spinning spheres with homogen...

Scientific Representation

It is now part and parcel of the official philosophical wisdom that models are essential to the acquisition and organisation of scientific knowledge. It is also generally accepted that most models represent their target systems in one way or another. But what does it mean for a model to represent its target system? I begin by introducing three conundrums that a theory of scientific representati...

Transformation and Representation in Similarity

Objective Similarity and Mental Representation

The claim that similarity plays a role in representation has been philosophically discredited. Psychologists, however, routinely analyze the success of mental representations for guiding behavior in terms of a similarity between representation and the world. I provide a foundation for this practice by developing a philosophically responsible account of the relationship between similarity and re...

Scientific representation and theoretical equivalence

In this paper I connect two debates in the philosophy of science; the questions of scientific representation and both model and theoretical equivalence. I argue that by paying attention to how a model is used to draw inferences about its target system, we can define a notion of theoretical equivalence that turns on whether their models licence the same claims about the same target systems. I br...