Results 31 to 40 of about 138 (133)

The Problem of Differential Importability and Scientific Modeling

Philosophies
The practice of science appears to involve “model-talk”. Scientists, one thinks, are in the business of giving accounts of reality. Scientists, in the process of furnishing such accounts, talk about what they call “models”.
Anish Seal
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Fictionalism in Ontology: The 2011 Paolo Bozzi Lecture

Rivista di Estetica, 2014
Fictionalism in ontology is a mixed bag. Here I focus on three main variants – which I label after the names of Pascal, Berkeley, and Hume – and consider their relative strengths and weaknesses. The first variant is just a version of the epistemic Wager,
Achille C. Varzi
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La représentation de la nature devant le juge : Plaidoyer pour une épistémologie juridique du fictif

VertigO, 2015
This paper explores the concept of Nature in a historical and theoretical dimension. The concept has two essential meanings for the legal scholar. Narrowly defined, that is in an ecological sense, it is known as the subject matter of a specialized branch
Jochen Sohnle
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Which Variety of Realism? Some Asseverations on the Dependence of Abstracta upon Concreta

Philosophia Scientiæ, 2008
Lowe's criticism of nihilism is discussed. Nihilism seems to involve a commitment to abstract entities and Lowe used recently the Dependence Principle (DP) — abstracta depend upon concreta — in order to block reference to abstract entities: numbers are ...
Frédéric Nef
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Do Computer Simulations Include Digital Artifacts?

Metaphysics
In contemporary computer simulations, particles attract each other and form clusters, cells interact, and agents communicate with one another. This is at least how computer simulations are commonly described. But how can we make sense of such talk?
Claus Beisbart
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Les origines de la philosophie du comme si

Philosophia Scientiæ, 2016
Today Vaihinger’s philosophy of “as if” enjoys wide interest as part of the renaissance of fictionalism. We have translated Vaihinger’s article “Wie die Philosophie des Als Ob entstand” which appeared in Die deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart in ...
Hans Vaihinger
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Fiction, Fictionality, and Pictures

, 2021
Kendall Walton has recently claimed that the notion of fictionality is more fundamental and philosophically relevant than the distinction between (works of) fiction and (works of) non-fiction. In this chapter, I argue that one of the reasons why the latter distinction is important is precisely that it affects what turns out to be fictional or true in a
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A Scholastic-Realist Modal-Structuralism

Philosophia Scientiæ, 2014
How are we to understand the talk about properties of structures the existence of which is conditional upon the assumption of the reality of those structures?
Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen
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Really Fictional Fiction

The Iowa Review, 1999
EUzabeth MacKiernan's Ancestors Maybe is a very serious novel masquerading as a hoUday fable. As "hoUday fable," Ancestors Maybe describes events from October to New Year's that happen to and involve three generations of a family and their immediate neighbors in Middletown, Connecticut.
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How Broad Modal Fictionalism Can Survive Rosen’s Challenge

Analiza i Egzystencja
Gideon Rosen described the difficulties faced by those who claim that statements about possible worlds cannot be literally true. According to his argument, if the truth of modal sentences could be explained by referring to the hypothesis of the plurality
Tomasz Puczyłowski
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