A popular view of models among economists and philosophers alike is that all models are false, but some are useful. Models are frequently treated as convenient fictions, idealizations, stories about credible worlds, or "near enough" to the truth. But such a understandings pose serious questions,...

A popular view of models among economists and philosophers alike is that all models are false, but some are useful. Models are frequently treated as convenient fictions, idealizations, stories about credible worlds, or "near enough" to the truth. But such a understandings pose serious questions,...

Many studies explore when and how young people make sexual choices but few empirical investigations link their sexual motivations with their inner conceptions about their sexual identities. We used multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis to connect young adult participants’ (N = 128)...

This paper addresses a specific way of using representational models to construct other models, dubbed ‘generative constructive use’. This use is distinguished from other ways of using models to construct new models. In particular, the case study shows how the model, in coordination with its...

The Representational Theory of Measurement conceives measurement as establishing homomorphisms from empirical relational structures into numerical relation structures, called models. There are two different approaches to deal with the justification of a model: an axiomatic and an empirical...

It has recently been aptly emphasized that how models are used is essential to what scientific models are. But the explanations of why and how a model is used or why a model is scientifically valuable are still merely in terms of the relation between the model and its target, just as they were...

It has recently been aptly emphasized that how models are used is essential to what scientific models are. But the explanations of why and how a model is used or why a model is scientifically valuable are still merely in terms of the relation between the model and its target, just as they were...

Models are generally used by scientists to obtain predictions and to provide explanations about phenomena. Their predictive and explanatory power is generally thought of as depending on their representative power. It is still not clear, though, in virtue of which features models allow scientists...

Traditional accounts of explanation fail to illuminate the explanatory relevance of “models that are descriptively false” in the sense that the regularities they entail fail to obtain. In this paper, I propose an account of explanation, which I call ‘explanation by concretization’, that...