Representation, reality, and the philosophy of special sciences

Yukinori Onishi
Kyoto University / JSPS Research Fellow

No one would deny that science constructs representations of the world, or at least
aims to do so. But when it comes to the problem concerning the nature of scientificrepresentation, e.g., “What aspects of the world (observable/unobservable) does it(aim to) represent?” “How can models or theories contain information about theworld?, ” or more broadly “What is scientific representation?,” there is no clear-cut
answer. Recently the problem of scientific representation has been much discussed
in the literature (Swoyer 1991; Hughes 1997; French and Ladyman 1999; French2003; Suarez 2003, 2004; Giere 2004; Callender and Cohen 2006; Frigg 2006;
Contessa 2007, 2011; Van Fraassen 2008; Chakravartty 2010). Based on these
discussions, this workshop approaches to the problem from the philosophy ofspecial sciences.
The background of the recent discussion on scientific representation can be traced
back to the shift in the view of scientific theories as well as the analyses of thenature of scientific theorizing occurred from the 1960s to 80s. According to “thesemantic view of theories,” a theory is a family of models rather than a linguisticentity. Since models are extra-linguistic entities, they are neither true nor false.
They tell us something about the world by representing it rather than describing it.
Thus there appears a problem of how those representations are related to theworld, or how they can contain information about it. Some philosophers claim it isby (partial) isomorphism between the structures of representations and those of
the target systems1 (French and Ladyman 1999), and some maintain it is bysimilarity (in certain aspects and to certain degrees) between representations andtheir targets (Giere 1988, 2004). Other philosophers deny the central role of such
relations and stress the importance of other elements, like stipulation (Callenderand Cohen 2006) or the ability to allow surrogate reasoning and inference (Suarez1

This expression would be a little bit misleading, since for them “empirical systems”
are models of data (Ibid. p.112, 115).

2003, 2004).
Contessa (2011) classifies the recent debate over the problem of scientificrepresentation into those about 1) what makes a vehicle an epistemic
representation, and those about 2) what makes a representation more faithful toits target. According to his classification, Callender, Cohen, and Suarez areconcerned with the latter problem, while French, Ladyman, and Giere are with theformer. So they have discussed the different problems under the heading of “theproblem of scientific representation.” Surely this classification gets rid of aconfusion found in the current debate over scientific representation.
However, there is another problem in the recent discussions; they are based mainlyon examples of everyday representations (maps, pictures) or examples fromphysics. Although it is quite reasonable to start an inquiry or to explain something
using examples we are familiar with, it is also important to look at more complex
and diverse examples from the actual scientific activity once we get a certain
insight about the subject of inquiry. This workshop considers the problem ofscientific representation using the examples of representation from special
sciences, including biology, economics, and geoscience. We also want to discuss theproblem of reality of scientific representation, based on the insight we get from thepresentations.