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Beyond Mimesis and Convention Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science BEYOND MIMESIS AND CONVENTION BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Editors ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University JÜRGEN RENN, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science KOSTAS GAVROGLU, University of Athens Editorial Advisory Board THOMAS F. GLICK, Boston University ADOLF GRÜNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh SYLVAN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University JOHN J. STACHEL, Boston University MARX W. WARTOFSKY†, (Editor 1960–1997) VOLUME 262 For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/5710 BEYOND MIMESIS AND CONVENTION Representation in Art and Science Edited by ROMAN FRIGG London School of Economics, London, England and MATTHEW C. HUNTER California Institute of Technology, USA 123 Editors Roman Frigg Matthew C. Hunter Department of Philosophy, Logic California Institute of Technology and Scientific Method Division of Humanities and Social Sciences London School of Economics MC 101-40 and Political Science Pasadena, CA 91125 Houghton Street USA London WC2A 2AE [email protected] United Kingdom [email protected] ISBN 978-90-481-3850-0 e-ISBN 978-90-481-3851-7 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3851-7 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2010924549 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 Chapter 11 is published with kind of permission of © John Hyman 2010. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Preface This volume has grown out of a conference that the editors organized at the London School of Economics and the Courtauld Institute of Art in June 2006. The aim of the conference was to bring together philosophers of science and historians of art to discuss representation. A topic of central importance to both the arts and the sciences, representation has generated similar conceptual problems in both fields, largely unbeknownst to the other community. Opening dialogue, we thought, would be productive and timely. In response to the call for papers, we received over eighty submissions, thirty of which were chosen for presentation by the program commit- tee. As the present volume took shape, we sought to complement the conference’s focus on visual art by soliciting further contributions. Thus, seven of the papers included here were presented in early form at the conference in 2006, while four have been added subsequently. In organizing the conference and putting this book together, we have incurred many debts. We would like to thank Peter Ainsworth, Elisabeth Schellekens, Christine Stevenson, and Sabine Wieber for serving on the conference’s program committee. The conference itself would not have been possible without the sup- port of the Courtauld Institute of Art’s Research Forum, and especially its former director, Pat Rubin; the Institute of Philosophy of the University of London; and the London School Economics. While we were still working on the program, Ingrid van Laarhoven of Springer encouraged us to submit a book proposal, and her continued enthusiasm for the project has been crucial. We have been lucky enough to be able to count on Lucy Fleet whose guiding hand and sustained support have helped keep the project on course. We would like to thank all of the speakers who made the 2006 conference such a memorable event and, especially, the contributors to this volume for their stimulating work. Each essay in the collection was read by two anony- mous referees, whose input made an invaluable contribution. Finally, we would like to thank Andrew Goldfinch and Daphne Kouretas for their excellent assistance in organizing the event and preparing the manuscript. v Contents Telling Instances ............................... 1 Catherine Z. Elgin Models: Parables v Fables .......................... 19 Nancy Cartwright Truth and Representation in Science: Two Inspirations from Art .... 33 Anjan Chakravartty Learning Through Fictional Narratives in Art and Science ....... 51 David Davies Models as Make-Believe ........................... 71 Adam Toon Fiction and Scientific Representation .................... 97 Roman Frigg Fictional Entities, Theoretical Models and Figurative Truth ............................ 139 Manuel García-Carpintero Visual Practices Across the University ................... 169 James Elkins Experiment, Theory, Representation: Robert Hooke’s Material Models ...................... 193 Matthew C. Hunter Lost in Space: Consciousness and Experiment in the Work of Irwin and Turrell ...................... 221 Dawna Schuld Art and Neuroscience ............................ 245 John Hyman Index ..................................... 263 vii Contributors Nancy Cartwright London School of Economics, London, UK; University of California, San Diego, CA, USA, [email protected] Anjan Chakravartty Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S IK7, Canada, [email protected] David Davies McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada, [email protected] Catherine Z. Elgin Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, [email protected] James Elkins School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA, [email protected] Roman Frigg London School of Economics, London, UK, [email protected] Manuel García-Carpintero LOGOS-Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, [email protected] Matthew C. Hunter California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA, [email protected] John Hyman University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, [email protected] Dawna Schuld Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, USA, [email protected] Adam Toon University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany, [email protected] ix About the Authors Nancy Cartwright is Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics and at the University of California at San Diego. She specializes in the philosophy of natural and social science and has worked extensively on modeling in science, especially in physics and economics. Her most recent work is on the nature and use of evidence for evidence-based policy. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the German Society of Science (Leopoldina), the American Philosophical Society and a former MacArthur Fellow. She is currently president of the Philosophy of Science Association. Anjan Chakravartty is Associate Professor and Director of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on central issues in the epistemology of science and metaphysics, including topics in the philosophy of physics and biology. He is a winner of the bien- nial Canadian Philosophical Association Book Prize for A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable (Cambridge University Press 2007), and has published widely on scientific realism, causation, laws of nature, and metaphysics and empiricism, as well as on models, abstraction and idealization, and scientific representation. David Davies is Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. He is the author of Art as Performance (Blackwell, 2004), Aesthetics and Literature (Continuum, 2007), and Philosophical Foundations of the Performing Arts (Blackwell, forthcoming), and the editor of The Thin Red Line (2008) in the Routledge series Philosophers on Film. He has published widely in the philosophy of art on topics relating to ontology, artistic value, literature, film, music, theatre, and the visual arts. He has also published articles on topics in metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. Catherine Z. Elgin is professor of philosophy of education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is the author of Considered Judgment, Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary, With Reference to Reference, and co-author (with Nelson Goodman) of Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences. She is editor of The Philosophy of Nelson Goodman, and co-editor (with Jonathan E. Adler) of Philosophical Inquiry. She has received fellowships from the National xi xii About the Authors Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Dewey Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Bunting Institute. James Elkins is E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His writing focuses on the history and theory of images in art, science, and nature. Among his books on scientific images are Six Stories from the End of Representation: Images in Painting, Photography, Microscopy, Astronomy, Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics, 1985–2000 (2008) and The Domain of Images (1999). In addition to editing the seven-volume The Art Seminar series (2005–2008), his current projects include a book called The Project of Painting: 1900–2000, a series called Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts, and a book written against Camera Lucida. Roman Frigg is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the London School of Economics and Deputy Director of the Centre for Natural and
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