Story-Making and Model-Making: Ontological Fictionalism and the Problem of Representation in Scientific Models

Abstract

Scientists represent the world with the help of various tools and one of their most important tools is scientific models. In many cases, complex phenomena in the real world are represented by constructing simple, idealized models. Models raise important questions in the philosophy of science, but two of them are more fundamental than the others. The first is what models are basically, and the second is how models represent the world. In this paper, we mainly address the first question, ontology of models, in the context of fictionalism about scientific models, but we show that the two questions are intertwined and that the answer to the ontological question limits our answers to the question of representation. In theoretical modeling, scientists often make assumptions that do not hold in the physical world. Scientists, on the other hand, "pretend" that there are "entities" in the world about which what the model describes is true. One of the fascinating solutions that has been proposed in recent years regarding the ontology of theoretical models is an approach called "fictionalism" in which the concept of "pretend play" and "make-believe" is used to answer the ontological question.