ABSTRACT
Our commonsense view of science invites conflicting reactions to the idea that imagination plays an important role in scientific inquiry. On the one hand, the world of make-believe seems far removed from the slow, painstaking accumulation of facts we commonly take to be characteristic of the scientific method. On the other hand, we celebrate stories of great, creative leaps of the imagination in science, such as the famous story of August Kekulé’s discovery of the ring structure of benzene after dreaming of a snake swallowing its own tail. This chapter will focus on the role of the imagination in one important part of scientific inquiry, namely scientific modeling. Modeling plays a crucial role in scientists’ attempts to understand the world. And yet it is also puzzling since, in modeling, scientists appear to be able to learn about the world by first learning about things that don’t exist, like perfect spheres or frictionless surfaces. As a result, modeling poses a range of questions for philosophers of science: What are models? How do they represent real systems in the world? How can learning about models help us to learn about those systems? Scientists often talk of modeling in terms of the imagination. When we are presented with
the Newtonian model of the solar system, for example, we might be told to “imagine that the sun and earth are perfect spheres, isolated from the other planets …” In a similar manner, a biology textbook might ask us to “imagine a population of predators and prey, which interact in the following way …” When we read such passages, it seems, we are being invited to turn our attention away from the blooming, buzzing confusion we find around us to ponder a simpler, more straightforward world before our mind’s eye. Recently, a number of authors have suggested that paying closer attention to the imagination might help us to address the philosophical issues raised by scientific modeling. Some have also developed this idea by drawing on work in philosophy of art and fiction. These approaches fall into two camps: indirect fiction views and direct fiction views. According to indirect fiction views, when scientists represent the world in modeling they do so indirectly, via a model system. Model systems are simplified or idealized versions of the real world that the scientist asks us to imagine. Proponents of this approach often compare model systems to fictional characters, like Sherlock Holmes or Madame Bovary. By contrast, direct fiction views reject this appeal to model systems. According to direct fiction views, scientists represent the world directly, by
asking us to imagine things about it. Proponents of this approach sometimes compare models to works of historical fiction, which represent real people, places or events. This chapter will examine both of these approaches to scientific modeling in detail and consider the motivation behind them, as well as some objections that have been raised against them.
