Beyond Mimesis and Convention

by Frigg, Roman; Hunter, Matthew C.

• ISBN13: 9789048138500
• ISBN10: 9048138507
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-06-21
• Publisher: Springer Verlag

Summary

Representations play a crucial role in both science and art. Perceived as different in kind, artistic and scientific representations have been studied as objects of distinct disciplinary and intellectual traditions. However, recent work in both the philosophy of science and studies of the arts suggests that these apparently different representational traditions may be related in challenging and mutually illuminating ways. Drawing from essays presented at a two-day conference held in London in 2006, Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science seeks to open conversations between and beyond these compartmentalized traditions of thinking about representation. Rather than presenting a uniform program, this volume provides a set of interrelated problems with which both philosophers of science and students of the arts can engage.Since the rise of the "semantic view" of scientific theories, philosophers of science have come to recognize models as essential to science. According to dominant accounts, the representational function of models is explained by appeal to mimetic relationships such as similarity or formal relations like isomorphism. But, these views have been subjected to increasing criticisms as philosophers have sought to account for the abstraction, idealization and other non-mimetic features of the representations actually used by scientists. In attending to these "fictional" dimensions of scientific representation, philosophers have begun to draw and explore analogies with representation in the visual and literary arts.