Van Fraassen argues that data provide the target-end structures required by structuralist accounts of scientific representation. But models represent phenomena not data. Van Fraassen agrees but argues that there is no pragmatic difference between taking a scientific model to accurately represent a physical system and accurately represent data extracted from it. In this article I reconstruct his argument and show that it turns on the false premise that the pragmatic content of acts of representation include doxastic commitments.

I distinguish several doctrines that economic methodologists have found attractive, all of which have a positivist flavor. One of these is the doctrine that preference assignments in economics are just shorthand descriptions of agents’ choices. Although most of these doctrines are problematic, the latter doctrine about preference assignments is a respectable one, I argue. It does not entail any of the problematic doctrines, and indeed it is warranted independently of them.

Natural conditions are provided that are sufficient to ensure that causality as defined by approaches that use counterfactual dependence and structural equations will be transitive.

The article argues for the epistemic rationale of triangulation, namely, the use of multiple and independent sources of evidence. It claims that triangulation is to be understood as causal reasoning from data to phenomenon, and it rationalizes its epistemic value in terms of controlling for likely errors and biases of particular data-generating procedures. This perspective is employed to address objections against triangulation concerning the fallibility and scope of the inference, as well as problems of independence, incomparability, and discordance of evidence. The debate on the existence of social preferences is used as an illustrative case.

In a deterministically evolving world, the usefulness of nontrivial probabilities can seem mysterious. I use the ‘Mentaculus’ machinery developed by David Albert and Barry Loewer to show how all probabilities in such a world can be derived from a single, initial chance event. I go on to argue that this is the only genuine chance event. Perhaps surprisingly, we have good evidence of its existence and nature. I argue that the existence of this chance event justifies our epistemic reliance on nontrivial probabilities.

A number of models of general relativity seem to contain “holes” that are thought to be “physically unreasonable.” One seeks a condition to rule out these models. We examine a number of possibilities already in use. We then introduce a new condition: epistemic hole-freeness. Epistemic hole-freeness is not just a new condition—it is new in kind. In particular, it does not presuppose a distinction between space-times that are “physically reasonable” and those that are not.

I explain and assess here Huygens’s concept of relative motion. I show that it allows him to ground most of the Law of Inertia and also to explain rotation. Thereby his concept obviates the need for Newton’s absolute space. Thus, his account is a powerful foundation for mechanics, although not without some tension.