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Two Kinds of Exploratory Models

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Michela Massimi
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Abstract

I analyze the exploratory function of two main modeling practices: targetless fictional models and hypothetical perspectival models. In both cases, I argue, modelers invite us to imagine or conceive something about the target system, which is known to be either nonexistent (fictional models) or just hypothetical (in perspectival models). I clarify the kind of imagining or conceiving involved in each modeling practice, and I show how each—in its own right—delivers important modal knowledge. I illustrate these two kinds of exploratory models with Maxwell’s ether model and supersymmetric particle models at the Large Hadron Collider.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 86 , Issue 5 , December 2019 , pp. 869 - 881
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology in Toronto, and at the Models and Simulations 8 conference in South Carolina. I thank the audiences, especially Jossi Berkovitz, Alisa Bokulich, Stephen wnes, Kevin Elliott, Axel Gelfert, Peter Mättig, Michael Miller, James Nguyen, Chris Pincock, Elay Schech, Michael Stoeltzner, Morgan Thompson, and Michael Weisberg for helpful comments. Special thanks to Alan Barr and Michael Krämer for many insightful conversations on pMSSM-19. This article is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (European Consolidator grant H2020-ERC-2014-CoG 647272, Perspectival Realism: Science, Knowledge, and Truth from a Human Vantage Point).

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