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Reckoning with Continuum Idealizations: Some Lessons from Soil Hydrology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2022

Travis Holmes
Travis Holmes*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, MO, US
*
Email: tlhgyf@mail.missouri.edu
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Abstract

In scientific modeling, continuum idealizations bridge scales but at the cost of fundamentally misrepresenting the microstructure of the system. This engenders a mystery. If continuum idealizations are dispensable in principle, this de-problematizes their representational inaccuracy, since continuum properties reduce to lower-scale properties, but the mystery of how this reduction could be carried out endures. Alternatively, if continuum idealizations are indispensable in principle, this is consistent with their explanatory and predictive success but renders their representational inaccuracy mysterious. I argue for a deflationary solution, enlisting the applied scientific method of upscaling as demonstrated in a case from soil hydrology.

Type
Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 89 , Issue 2 , April 2022 , pp. 319 - 336
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

The author would like to thank Robert Batterman, Mark Wilson, and Andre Ariew for instructive conversations pertinent to the topic of the paper.

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