Print Email Facebook Twitter Representation and Similarity: Suárez on Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Scientific Representation Title Representation and Similarity: Suárez on Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Scientific Representation Author Poznic, M. Faculty Technology, Policy and Management Department Values Technology and Innovation Date 2015-07-22 Abstract The notion of scientific representation plays a central role in current debates on modeling in the sciences. One or maybe the major epistemic virtue of successful models is their capacity to adequately represent specific phenomena or target systems. According to similarity views of scientific representation, models should be similar to their corresponding targets in order to represent them. In this paper, Suárez’s arguments against similarity views of representation will be scrutinized. The upshot is that the intuition that scientific representation involves similarity is not refuted by the arguments. The arguments do not make the case for the strong claim that similarity between vehicles and targets is neither necessary nor sufficient for scientific representation. Especially, one claim that a similarity view wants to uphold, still, is the following thesis: only if a vehicle is similar to a target in relevant respects and to a specific degree of similarity then the vehicle is a scientific representation of that target. Subject modelsscientific representationsimilarityisomorphism To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:7a882bde-37c0-4931-b6ea-89a1be44c1c6 Publisher Springer ISSN 0925-4560 Source https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-015-9307-7 Source Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 2015 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights (c) 2015 The Author(s)This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Files PDF Poznic_2015.pdf 296.59 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:7a882bde-37c0-4931-b6ea-89a1be44c1c6/datastream/OBJ/view