Towards an Ontology of Scientific Models

Abstract

Scientific models occupy centre stage in scientific practice. Correspondingly, in recent literature in the philosophy of science, scientific models have been a focus of research. However, little attention has been paid so far to the ontology of scientific models. In this essay, I attempt to clarify the issues involved in formulating an informatively rich ontology of scientific models. Although no full-blown theorycontaining all ontological issues involved-is provided, I make several distinctions and point to several characteristic properties exhibited by scientific models that are relevant for individuating scientific models.

Models and representation

“…But then, on Similarity 2, M is not a representation at all. Ducheyne (2008) embraces this conclusion when he offers a variant of a similarity account which explicitly takes the success of the hypothesized similarity between a model and its target to be a necessary condition on the model representing the target. In Section 2 we argued that the possibility of misrepresentation is condition of adequacy for any acceptable account of representation and so we submit that misrepresentation should not be conflated with non-representation (cf.…”

“…In principle every option available in the extensive literature on fiction is a candidate for an ontology of models; for reviews of these options see Friend's (Friend 2007) and Salis' (Salis). Different authors have made different choices, with proposals being offered by Contessa (2010), Ducheyne (2008), , Godfrey-Smith (2009), Levy (2015), and Sugden (2009). Cat (2012), Liu (2012;, Pincock (2012, Ch.…”

Advances in technology commercialization models

“…What is a model (what is the ontology of models) and how reliable is the knowledge they produce (what is the epistemology of models)? Nearly all discussions of scientific models are directed to the questions of how do scientific models represent, rather than the issue of their ontologies (Ducheyne 2008) or epistemologies. Beginning at least in the 1934 with the 1 "We use the word 'science' here in its widest sense, including all theoretical knowledge, no matter whether in the field of natural sciences or in the field of the social sciences and the socalled humanities, and no matter whether it is knowledge found by the application of special scientific procedures, or knowledge based on common sense in everyday life" (Carnap 1991(Carnap [1938: 394395).…”

“…At their cores, these are all treatments of how models represent. In contrast, in a genuinely ontological treatment, models have been viewed as mental representations (Morgan 2014) that allow surrogative reasoning (i.e., that allow a user to perform specific inferences from the model to the system) that lead to empirically testable results, whereby an empirically adequate model is said to be scientific (Ducheyne 2008). Here, the close relation to empirical results is asserted to render a model as not fictional.…”

“…Mathematical model theory, the study of interpretation of any language with settheoretic structures, using Tarski's Truth definition as developed in 1933 (Tarski 1933a) and revised in 1956 (Tarski and Vaught 1956), does not address the issue. Models have been studied in their various aspect, including ontology ( Ducheyne 2008, Levy 2015, realist and nonrealist types ( bin Abdul Murad 2011 ), and phenomenological models for representing physical systems (Portides 2011); but the question of whether models are technologicalinterventional has not yet been addressed. 6 Rogers (20106 Rogers ( [1962: 14) defined technology as "… a design for instrumental action that reduces the uncertainty in the cause-effect relationships involved in achieving a desired outcome.…”