In this book, Suárez develops a conception of representation that delivers a compelling account of modeling practice. He begins by discussing the history and methodology of model building, charting the emergence of what he calls the modeling attitude, a nineteenth-century and fin de siècle development. Prominent cases of models, both historical and contemporary, are used as benchmarks for the accounts of representation considered throughout the book. After arguing against reductive naturalist theories of scientific representation, Suárez sets out his own account: a case for pluralism regarding the means of representation and minimalism regarding its constituents. He shows that scientists employ a variety of modeling relations in their representational practice—which helps them to assess the accuracy of their representations—while demonstrating that there is nothing metaphysically deep about the constituent relation that encompasses all these diverse means.
The book also probes the broad implications of Suárez’s inferential conception outside scientific modeling itself, covering analogies with debates about artistic representation and philosophical thought over the past several decades.
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The 2022 article “The lady vanishes” by Ann-Sophie Barwich, published on the online magazine AEON, is devoted to Mary Hesse. It is an interesting peice where Barwich argues that “the overwhelming absence of women in intellectual history is constructed. And we won’t prevent the fading of women from future history simply with an occasional reminder about the existence of a few remarkable individuals throughout the ages. What really causes our collective forgetting is the stepwise removal of their names from ongoing conversation.” For Barwich, “the story of Mary Hesse shows how quickly even well-known women from our recent past can vanish from the collective memory of their peers.”
Hesse was different. Her ideas present a refreshing departure from her contemporaries’ single-minded infatuation with the logic and justification of scientific knowledge and the idea that the rationality of philosophers ruled the foundation of science.
Mary Hesse at the Ninth Symposium of the Colston Research Society in Bristol (1957)
