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Thumper the Infinitesimal Rabbit: A Fictionalist Perspective on Some “Unimaginable” Model Systems in Biology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Brian McLoone
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Abstract

Fictionalists believe that scientific models are about model systems that are imaginary. Michael Weisberg has claimed that fictionalism is indefensible because many scientific models are about model systems that are unimaginable. According to a certain account of imagination, what Weisberg says is plausible. According to another, more defensible account of imagination, it is not. I discuss these issues within the context of an allegedly unimaginable model system in ecology, but the conclusions I draw are more general. I then describe how fictionalism should be recast in order to deal with Weisberg’s critique.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 86 , Issue 4 , October 2019 , pp. 662 - 671
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I would like to thank Hayley Clatterbuck and Elliott Sober for commenting on this article and Louis Fan, Roman Frigg, Conor Lawless, Laurence Loewe, Tudor Protopopescu, and Michael Stuart for useful correspondence and discussion. The ideas in this article also benefited from the comments and criticism of colloquium participants at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, the Philosophy of Science Conference at the Inter-University Centre Dubrovnik, and the Philosophy Speaker Series at the Higher School of Economics.

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