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Modeling without Mathematics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Martin Thomson-Jones
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Abstract

Inquiries into the nature of scientific modeling have tended to focus their attention on mathematical models and, relatedly, to think of nonconcrete models as mathematical structures. The arguments of this article are arguments for rethinking both tendencies. Nonmathematical models play an important role in the sciences, and our account of scientific modeling must accommodate that fact. One key to making such accommodations, moreover, is to recognize that one kind of thing we use the term ‘model’ to refer to is a collection of propositions.

Type
Fictions, Models and Representation
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 79 , Issue 5 , December 2012 , pp. 761 - 772
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I am especially indebted to Arnon Levy and Edouard Machery for helpful correspondence on the chemoton model and on modeling in cognitive neuropsychology, respectively. Thanks also to Isabelle Peschard, Bas van Fraassen, and Michael Weisberg, my cosymposiasts; to Roman Frigg, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Mathias Frisch, and Phil Ehrlich for discussion at the PSA; and to Michael Strevens, Stephen Barker, Felipe De Brigard, Felipe Romero, and the other audience members at the Second Colombian Congress on Logic, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science in Bogotá in 2012.

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