Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

The scientific enterprise enriches the debate about models. In particular, in the field of structural biology, a new deep-learning neural network system called AlphaFold has been applied for many purposes. It allows us to predict a protein’s structure with high accuracy. I will present the system in light of the discussion of structure representation and argue for a specific kind of representational relation holding between the predicted model structure and its target-system. By doing so, I will criticize the artifactual approach advanced by Knuuttila (2021) and present the features that…

In this paper, I will deal with the use of fictional models in the context of the realism vs antirealism debate. Specifically, I will argue that the explanatory role of fictional models can be accommodated by scientific realism. I will refer to the work of Alisa Bokulich, who has proposed a modification of realism in order to account for explanations employing fictional models. My own approach will be to offer an alternative: instead of a modification of realism, I will propose a modified notion of representation. Based on the work…

Realists and antirealists agree that different theories can be more or less empirically successful, even if they disagree on how to interpret this fact. Most of their arguments rely on how the notion of success is understood; still, few definitions of success are available, and their adequacy is doubtful. In this paper, we discuss some of these definitions and introduce a new measure of the success of a theory relative to a body of evidence aimed at overcoming some of their limitations. We moreover discuss how empirical success is connected…

Starting from some results of neuroscience, and especially of Embodied Cognition, I’ll discuss the problem of the intelligent use of tools, as a useful perspective under which to investigate the link between common knowledge and scientific knowledge. The philosophical question from which I shall start my reflection is the following: how do we represent reality to ourselves when we intervene on it through the intelligent use of a tool? The answer to this problem will be developed in two fundamental steps. 1. The problem of the intelligent use of tools…

The currently mainstream view is that, in normal conditions, our perceptual representations are largely accurate, as natural selection tends to favor epistemically reliable perceptual systems. This latter assumption has been questioned by Donald Hoffman and his collaborators by drawing on the formal tools of evolutionary game theory. According to their model, an organism whose visual system were tuned to objective reality would be driven to extinction. We argue that their model fails to take environmental modifications into due account, and we show that, once such changes are incorporated into the…

Modelling is a precious source of information in science. With models, we can simplify an otherwise messy reality in order to understand the fundamental driving forces of a system, like an epidemic, and we can try to predict the course of events in complex scenarios where there is a great degree of uncertainty. In short, models can be used to explain and predict phenomena. Yet models interact with expert opinions in two fundamental ways. They are sometimes in competition with expert opinion, and they are sometimes heavily dependent, for their…

One of the many peculiar phenomena that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought about is the engagement of non-scientists with specific questions surrounding the interpretation of epidemiological data and models. Many of them have even begun to get involved in the collection, analysis, and presentation of the data themselves. A reason for this might be that the insights that science can provide in a situation of crisis are often inconclusive or preliminary, motivating many people to look for the answers to pressing questions themselves. Moreover, public engagement is facilitated by the…

Unsurprisingly, science has been conferred growing expectations in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Accordingly, the issue of dissemination and popularization of scientific outcomes has come to the fore. The article describes the main features of the so-called dominant view in popular science, which is claimed to be implicitly connected to scientism, a stance identifying science as the most (if not the only) reliable source of legitimate knowledge. Scientism’s implicit philosophical roots are argued to lie in naturalism and a trivialized neopositivist concept of science, which underscores the supposed unity…

An impressive effort by the scientific community has quickly made available SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, indispensable allies in the fight against COVID-19. Nevertheless, in liberal democracies, getting vaccinated is an individual choice and a not-negligible number of persons might turn out to be vaccine refusers. Behavioral and Cognitive (B&C) scientists have cast light on the key behavior drivers of the vaccine choice and suggested choice architectures to boost vaccine uptake. In this paper, we identify a somehow neglected psychological phenomenon, that it is reasonable to believe to hamper the vaccine uptake whereby…

This paper explores the Persistence Question about cities, that is, what is necessary and sufficient for two cities existing at different times to be numerically identical. We first show that we can possibly put an end to the existence of a city in a number of ways other than by physically destroying it, which reveals the metaphysics of cities to be partly different from that of ordinary objects. Then we focus in particular on the commonly perceived vulnerability of cities to imaginary relocation; and we make the hypothesis that cities…