Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T14:50:23.974Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

True Lies: Realism, Robustness, and Models

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Jay Odenbaugh
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that uneliminated idealizations pose a serious problem for scientific realism. I consider one method for “de-idealizing” models—robustness analysis. However, I argue that unless idealizations are eliminated from an idealized theory and robustness analysis need not do that, scientists are not justified in believing that the theory is true. I consider one example of modeling from the biological sciences that exemplifies the problem.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 78 , Issue 5 , December 2011 , pp. 1177 - 1188
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

‡

I would like to thank Rebecca Copenhaver, Eddie Cushman, Ronald Giere, Wendy Parker, Nicholas D. Smith, and Michael Weisberg for their questions and comments regarding this article.

References

Bowler, P. 1983. The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolutionary Theories in the Decades around 1900. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Fisher, R. A. 1930. The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Oxford: Clarendon.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horn, H. 1971. The Adaptive Geometry of Trees. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Horn, H.. 1974. “The Ecology of Secondary Succession.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 5:25–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horn, H.. 1975a. “Forest Succession.” Scientific American 232:90–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horn, H.. 1975b. “Markovian Properties of Forest Succession.” In Ecology and Evolution of Communities, ed. Cody, M. L. and Diamond, J. M.. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Levins, R. 1966. “The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology.” American Scientist 54:421–31.Google Scholar
Levins, R.. 1993. “A Response to Orzack and Sober: Formal Analysis and the Fluidity of Science.” Quarterly Review of Biology 68:547–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Orzack, S., and Sober, E. 1993. “A Critical Assessment of Levins’ ‘The Strategy of Model Building’ (1966).” Quarterly Review of Biology 68:534–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Fraassen, B. 1980. The Scientific Image. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weisberg, M. 2006. “Robustness Analysis.” Philosophy of Science 73:730–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wimsatt, W. 1981/2007. “Robustness, Reliability, and Overdetermination.” In Scientific Inquiry in the Social Sciences: A Volume in Honor of Donald T. Campbell, ed. Brewer, M. and Collins, B., 123–62. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Repr. in Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).Google Scholar