BOOK SYMPOSIUM

Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective

By BAS C. VAN FRAASSEN Oxford University Press, 2008. 416 pp. 35.00 cloth, 18.99 paper Summary
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BAS

VAN

FRAASSEN

The behaviour of pendulums and bouncing springs was well-known by Newtons time, but he represented both as systems subject to a force varying directly with the distance from a mid-point. Today we would say that Newtons theory provides models satisfying F = kx, and these models can be used to represent such phenomena. 1. Representation To understand what is involved in such a view of science we must first of all focus on representation. To represent is certainly not simply to produce scale copies, whether physical or abstract, though scientific representations do typically trade on selective resemblances in certain respects for their success. Just as artistic representations do, they trade also on selective distortion and systematic non-resemblance in other respects, and often embed the represented phenomena in much larger structures involving non-phenomenal elements. The pertinent selectivity needs to be conveyed, somehow, if the artefact, the vehicle of representation, is to represent its target. Think of a specific use of a graph of an exponential function. Does it represent the growth of a bacteria colony, of a bank account with compound interest or of the result of radioactive decay? Nothing that is in the graph or its structural relations to those three possible targets answers that question. If the selection is indicated by signs placed in the artefact itself, that task of identification is only pushed back a step. Thus, what determines the representation relationship must be a relation of what is in the artefact to factors neither in the artefact itself nor in what is being represented. The conclusion advanced is that there is no representation except in the sense that some things are used, made or taken, to represent some things as thus or so. This conclusion places use and user, and

Analysis Reviews Vol 70 | Number 3 | July 2010 | pp. 511514 doi:10.1093/analys/anq042 The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

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the role of indexical judgement, centre-stage in the analysis of scientific representation.

2. The Problem of Coordination Measurements occur in experimental procedure, under artificially designed conditions for empirical investigation. Under these conditions, measurement procedures produce representations images with complex, theorymediated relations to the entities on which the measurements are made. The content of the measurement outcome that is, the appearance of the measured object in the measurement set-up locates that object in a theoryprovided logical space. Clock readings and star sightings at sea may place the ship in the geographic space of latitudes and longitudes, measurements of acceleration in an Atwood machine may locate the two bobs in a mass-ratio relationship, a thermometer reading may locate the body on the Celsius scale. It is through measurement that the theoretical quantities in a model, or in the logical space whose points are a family of theoretical models, are coordinated to the physical world. The term coordination appeared in Machs writings on measurement in thermodynamics and became salient for the relation between mathematical and physical geometry in the decades straddling 1900. It came to prominence through the writings of Schlick and Reichenbach when logical empiricism was beginning to break with neoKantianism. The questions What counts as a measurement of (physical quantity) X? and What is (that physical quantity) X? cannot be answered independently of each other the famed hermeneutic circle. I examine this apparent circularity by focusing both on its more abstract consideration by Reichenbach, and on the practical response in history examined by Mach and Poincare , with the conclusion that pure or presuppositionless coordination is neither possible nor required. To examine the problem of coordination, measurement is here explored first of all from within as such procedures evolve in interaction with an evolving theory. Thereafter, measurement is then explored from above: that is, after the measurement procedures, concepts and theories have stabilized. This resting point in the conceptual and scientific development is fleeting and momentary yet marks a context in which it makes sense to ask about the world-picture of currently accepted physical theory. The physical conditions of possibility for measurement, the general theory of measurement and what cannot count as measurement in a theoretical context, are discussed, drawing on general lessons derived from 20th century foundations of physics. There is more to measurement than its physical correlate. A broad concept of measurement must accommodate both the constraints on its physical correlate and its function of information gathering, which requires that the measurement outcome is an event that has meaning. Measurement is itself

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a specific form of self-location, in a logical space; it is thus a practical form of representation presupposing a prior theoretical representation.

3. Structuralism Empiricist views are typically suspected of leading to either scepticism or idealism. Meanwhile, the scientific realism of the 1960s landed in difficulties that made it split into 57 or so varieties since the 1980s. The idea that what is central to scientific representation is structure, introduced by John Worrall in the mid 80s to save scientific realism, was so thoroughly linked to empiricist heroes such as Duhem, Poincare and Carnap that it appealed greatly to both sides. Its core in empiricist eyes was formulated by Hermann Weyl: that science can never determine its subject-matter except up to isomorphic representation. But there were serious difficulties to overcome, first of all that highlighted by Newmans famous argument which demolished Russells (and implicitly Carnaps) structuralism, and had reappeared as the core of Putnams modeltheoretic argument against metaphysical realism. To formulate an empiricist structuralism it is necessary first of all to emphasize that it must be a view on what science is, not a view of nature pertaining to a form-matter distinction. Secondly, this needs to be done in such a way that this view of science, as structural representation, does not lose sight of the aim, the criterion of success, of the scientific enterprise, which is to be adequate to the actual phenomena. The Loss of Reality threat looms large when the relation of structural representation to its real target is at issue, and particularly for an empiricist who cannot have recourse to the metaphysical realist idea of structure in nature postulated to be the mirrored duplicate of structure in a scientific model. Scientific representation typically displays a hierarchical structure in which higher theories have their models instantiated in those of more specific lower theories, all the way down to data models constructed directly from measurement results on actual phenomena. Since it is always only structure that is in play, we can think of all models as mathematical structures. Such relations as isomorphism and homomorphism are well defined precisely, but only, for mathematical entities. But in the end, how is a model even at the lowest level related to the phenomena being modelled? The phenomena are not mathematical entities, yet we present those models as representing them. At this point, focus must shift from the representation in the sense of the thing used to represent to representation in the sense of the act of representing. To offer something X as a representation of Y as F involves making claims about Y, and the adequacy of the representation hinges on the truth of those claims, but that point does not put us in the clutches of a metaphysics

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of truth makers. A good part of the present symposium is devoted to this point.

4. Appearance vs. Reality as a Scientific Problem The appearances, as distinct from the phenomena themselves, are the contents of outcomes of measurements performed on the accessible phenomenal entities. Thus saving the phenomena must be distinguished from saving the appearances. Philosophical appreciation of the sciences has traditionally seen them as having three main levels. There is theorica (to use an old term) where an underlying physical reality is postulated; then the phenomena, that is, the observable objects, events and processes that are to be accounted for; and finally the appearances in which those phenomena are manifest. Traditionally there have also been strong completeness criteria in play, at least as regulative ideals, such as, at one time, the conviction that scientific accounts are not complete till they achieve the form of deterministic theories. The one criterion that has survived longest is that the theory must show how the appearances derive from, are produced by the postulated underlying reality: the Appearance from Reality Criterion. Two examples implicitly violate the criterion: Leibnizs contention that the derivations exist but are beyond human comprehension, and the contention that psychological phenomena supervene on but are irreducible to the physical. More important is the argument from the measurement problem in quantum mechanics to show that the Copenhagen physicists explicitly refused to see that criterion as incumbent on scientific practice. Together these four parts present an empiricist, updated version of the Bildtheorie, the picture theory of science, as aiming to create empirically adequate representations of the empirical phenomena.

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Empiricist Structuralism, Metaphysical Realism, and the Bridging Problem

GABRIELE CONTESSA

1. Scientific realism (or at least one version of it) can be characterized as the conjunction of three theses, which, following Stathis Psillos (2000), I shall call the metaphysical, the semantic and the epistemological theses. The
Analysis Reviews Vol 70 | Number 3 | July 2010 | pp. 514524 doi:10.1093/analys/anq040 The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org