Scientific Models in Philosophy of Science

Foreword

F OREW OR D D B-J studied at the universities of Freiburg, Oxford, and Cambridge and from 1998 held positions in Paderborn, Bonn, and Pittsburgh, before setting up an Emmy-Noether research group in Heidelberg in 2005. She died on November 13, 2006, at the age of thirty-seven. Daniela spent much of her working life thinking and writing about models in science and investigating how the concept of a model was used in philosophy of science. She was fascinated by the many different forms modeling could take and was deeply interested in their historical development and in how scientists themselves used and perceived models. She herself was no stranger to science, having earned a master’s degree in astrophysics from the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge on the modeling of extragalactic radio sources. This book grew out of Daniela’s conviction of the central role that models play in science. In this endeavor she was at the forefront of a new movement in philosophy of science: a movement that took models, model building, and how models are used in science most seriously. Since the mid-1990s, the amount of attention paid by the philosophy of science community to models and their uses has increased considerably. It is an exciting new area of study. As Daniela elaborates throughout this book, models were discussed in philosophy of science in earlier times, most notably in the late 1950s and 1960s by Rom Harré, Mary Hesse, and Ernest Nagel. But at that time the questions posed revolved around whether models could play a logical role in theory articulation and testing. The alternative was that they were just heuristic or somehow psychologically beneficial in nonlogical ways. In this manner they partook of the mysteries of metaphors and analogies in language, which were thought to be useful or important, but since they worked in nonliteral ways, they somehow had to be false descriptions. The revived interest in models came when some philosophers, like Daniela, began to pay attention to the actual science and noted the almost ubiquitous role of models in many sciences. It became clear that many sciences had no “real” theories in the traditional philosophical vii Bailer FM:Layout 1 7/10/09 11:24 AM Page vii sense. Models often played an important role in developing claims about the mechanisms responsible for producing phenomena and in testing hypotheses resulting from such developments. This book assays the history of discussions about models in philosophy of science, and makes some striking claims about how models really function in science. Daniela discusses how models relate to some traditional views of theories, how models model phenomena, and how models represent reality. These topics are being discussed in many contemporary circles in philosophy of science. Daniela completed this book and submitted it for publication at the end of 2003, but it has taken several years for it to reach a wider audience. She received positive feedback on the manuscript, yet inevitably also some critical reviews, and had started to make some revisions . Since 1996 she had been undergoing cancer treatment. This became increasingly intense and exhausting, and at the same time she was also teaching, setting up a research group, undertaking other research , and being an active parent. When she died in 2006, the suggested revisions to the manuscript remained incomplete. We decided that it would be too difficult to complete the revisions on Daniela’s behalf and still keep the book in the spirit she intended. Given that she (as well as several reviewers) was happy with the original manuscript, we decided to publish the book as she intended. The only modifications are an updating of the bibliography (with thanks to Peter Machamer and Burlton Griffith for this undertaking) and minor language changes to the text. As the original publisher was not prepared to publish a posthumous work, we are grateful that the University of Pittsburgh Press, following the advice of its referees, agreed enthusiastically to take on this project. Although Daniela published various articles on different topics during her career, scientific models, it turned out, is her life’s work. In this book we have her intellectual legacy. Coryn Bailer-Jones Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg Peter Machamer Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh viii Foreword Bailer FM:Layout 1 7/10/09 11:24 AM Page viii ...