Models, Representation, and Mediation

Abstract

Representation has been one of the main themes in the recent discussion of models. Several authors have argued for a pragmatic approach to representation that takes users and their interpretations into account. It appears to me, however, that this emphasis on representation places excessive limitations on our view of models and their epistemic value. Models should rather be thought of as epistemic artifacts through which we gain knowledge in diverse ways. Approaching models this way stresses their materiality and media-specificity. Focusing on models as multifunctional artifacts releases them from any preestablished and fixed representational relationships and leads me to argue for a twofold approach to representation.

Models as artefacts of a dual nature: a philosophical contribution to teaching about models designed and used in engineering practice

“…These ''external target objects'' can be described in various terms by scholars as ''parts of the world, or … the world as we describe it'' (Hughes 1997, p. S325), ''objects or systems in the world'' (Morrison 1999, p. 38), ''some aspect of the world, or some aspect of our theories about the world, or both at once'' (Morrison and Morgan 1999, p. 11 Further, having agreed upon the representational task of models, one can also observe there has been different formulation suggested as to how such a role is played: ranging from the semantic conception which concentrates more on real target systems and models as the mirrored pictures of those systems (Giere 1988(Giere , 2004, to the pragmatic conceptions which conceive modelers, too, as active interveners-who build, interpret, and learn in modelling processes-and consider representation as a kind of rendering instead of merely mirroring. Furthermore, while the semantic view is restricted to focusing on, specifying and analyzing the representational relationship between models and their target systems through views such as isomorphism (Suppes 1962(Suppes , 1989Van Fraassen 1980;French and Ladyman 1999;French 2003), the pragmatic conception has more to do with taking more profound properties of models and also modelling processes into account (Morrison 1999;Morrison and Morgan 1999;Boumans 1999;Godfrey-Smith 2006;Weisberg 2007;Knuuttila and Voutilainen 2003;Knuuttila 2004Knuuttila , 2005Knuuttila , 2011Boon and Knuuttila 2009). For one thing, models have been considered as autonomous agents-partly released from only representing theories and world-mediating somewhat as independent investigation instruments in the hands of modelers (Morrison 1999;Morrison and Morgan 1999).…”

Varieties of noise: Analogical reasoning in synthetic biology

“…French & Ladyman, 1999)-that is precisely what the recent practice-oriented approaches to modeling and representation have sought to avoid (e.g. Giere, 2010;Knuuttila, 2005;Mäki, 2009;Suárez, 2010). It seems to us that the goal of highlighting the role of analogies in science is to make room for the constructive and imaginative moment of scientific reasoning; the different semantic-cum-structuralist accounts fixated on the structural relationships between the source and target systems fail to pay attention to this.…”

Realism, Pluralism and Naturalism in Biology

“…Several responses to this problem are possible. One would be to collapse Weisberg's (2007) distinction between models and abstract direct representation towards the former, and claim that in both cases we are dealing with some kind of cognitive instrument that illuminates the world by analogy rather than by direct description (Knuuttila 2005). Some go further and argue that scientific models are best seen as a kind of fiction and can be illuminated by exploiting ideas about literary fiction (e.g.…”

“…Many models in evolutionary theory or population ecology are of this kind. Somewhat similarly, Tarja Knuuttila (2005), focusing especially on economic models, holds that scientific models are best seen as cognitive tools, designed to explore a structure taken to be similar in some respects to a target system in the world, but by analogy rather than any direct correspondence. Abstract direct representation, on the other hand, involves representation of specific entities that are supposed to exist, but which are described in ways that abstract from some of their features that are taken to be unimportant given the purposes for which the representations are to be used.…”

“…As noted above, some models are not intended to be realistic. A paradigm area of science in which this is plausible is neoclassical economics (Knuuttila 2005). But there is an obvious and revealing contrast between economics and models in a field such as molecular biology.…”