Are Scientific Models Fictions? Model-Based Science as Epistemic Warfare, Lorenzo Magnani

In the current epistemological debate, scientific models are not only considered as useful devices for explaining facts or discovering new entities, laws, and theories.  They are also rubricated under various new labels:  from the classical ones, as abstract entities and idealizations, to the more recent, as fictions, surrogates, credible worlds, missing systems, make-believe, parables, functional, epistemic actions, revealing capacities.  Professor Magnani will discuss these approaches, showing some of their epistemological inadequacies and also taking advantage of recent results in cognitive science. The main aim is to revise and criticize fictionalism, reframing the received idea of abstractness and ideality of models with the help of recent results coming from the area of distributed cognition (common coding) and abductive cognition (manipulative).