Rudolf Carnap’s Der logische Aufbau der Welt (The Logical Structure of the World) is generally conceived of as being the failed manifesto of logical positivism. In this paper we...
: My aim in this paper is to articulate an account of scientific modeling that reconciles pluralism about modeling with a modest form of scientific realism. The central claim of th...
: ic models invariably involve some degree of idealization, abstraction, or fictionalization of their target system. Nonetheless, I argue that there are circumstances under which s...
: My main aim in this paper is to clarify the concepts of referential success and of referential continuity that are so crucial to the scientific realism debate. I start by conside...
If models can be true, where is their truth located? Giere (e.g. 1988) has suggested an account of theoretical models on which models themselves are not truth-valued. The paper su...
Are theories ‘underdetermined by the evidence’ in any way that should worry the scientific realist? I argue that no convincing reason has been given for thinking so. A crucial ...
Scientific and statistical inferences build heavily on explicit, parametric models, and often with good reasons. However, the limited scope of parametric models and the increasin...