Introduction: Theories, Models, and Scientific Representations

Radical artifactualism

“…Following this interpretation, then, a view like Amie Thomasson's (2020) fictionalist account of models as abstract artifacts would likely count as an example of hybrid artifactualism. Other, even more recent approaches have come out in the late stages of revising the present paper which deserve attention because of how they combine fictionalism and artifactualism or problematize the relation between the two: these can be found in the book edited by Alejandro Cassini and Juan Redmond (2021b), including a very detailed introduction by the editors (Cassini and Redmond 2021a), and illuminating chapters by Carrillo and Knuttila (2021), Suarez and Bolinska (2021), Frigg and Nguyen (2021) and Salis (2021), among others. 5 See, e.g., Millikan 1991 andChalmers 1992 for early uses of the distinction in different philosophical debates, but as clearly representational.…”

An alternative View for Scientific Models Based on Metaphors: a case analysis from Darwin's use of metaphors

“…Until now, we had some progress in this subject but not much. For instance, we can say that theories and models do not have the need of an explicit agreement about their relationship, such as if they were interchangeable, or as if models were independent entities (Cassini and Redmond 2021a). In other words, there is a plurality of ways in which models are used and related to other more traditional elements of scientific knowledge.…”

“…The third feature was inspired by Cassini and Redmond (2021a) and by Carrillo and Knuuttila (2021). In an enlightening text, where they mark the heterogeneous understandings around scientific model and its functions, uses, meanings, and employability, the authors also offered a general insight into the nature of scientific model which turns out to be helpful for our metaphor approach.…”

“…This being the case, Robert (2016) was somewhat correct in stating that models depict unfamiliar structures into familiar ones regarding some subject matter. However the way models idealize the phenomenon is not in a romantic or flowery manner where all sense of reality is lost and an emptied version of the phenomenon is proposed (Black 1962;Cassini and Redmond 2021a;Morgan and Morrison 1999). This romantic manner is related to an inadequate view of thinking about idealization which ultimately aims for "de-idealization" (Carrillo and Knuuttila 2021, p.52).…”

“…(Carrillo and Knuuttila 2021, p.52). 3 In this account, as Cassini and Redmond (2021a) pointed out, scientific model idealize the variable of interest. To achieve this, what scientific model does, based on a fundamental conception existing in many "if not most of these accounts [.…”