Talking about dirty things, or how to be a scientific fictionalist

It is sometimes suggested that, in science, if you want to understand why a natural phenomenon occurs, you need to consider an imaginary one. After a brief review of some episodes in the history of this idea, and a couple of examples from contemporary science, I present a fictionalist view about idealized models, which typically involve our imagination in the attempt to explain natural phenomena. According to this view, idealizing scientific claims (like “There is an infinite population”) are, or should be regarded as, fictional claims (just like, say, “There is a red-nosed reindeer”): they are literally false, because what they refer to does not exist, but they are nevertheless useful. I argue that, despite its initial appeal, this fictionalist view fails to show that idealized models can help us achieve scientific objectivity and understanding.

Iulian Danut Toader is an EURIAS fellow at the CEU's Institute for Advanced Study and a Marie Curie fellow at the Center for Logic, Philosophy and History of Science, University of Bucharest. His research interests and publications are in philosophy of science, history and philosophy of mathematics and logic, early analytic philosophy, and naturalistic metaphysics. Iulian's current project attempts to articulate and evaluate fictionalism about the methodology of model-building in the natural sciences. He is co-editing a book for Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science at Springer, and also guest-editing a special issue for Foundations of Physics.