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Pragmatism, Fictionalism, and Scientific Model Building

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  • Nélida Gentile,
  • Susana Lucero
Nélida Gentile
Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Susana Lucero
Universidad Nacional de Luján, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36446/af.e1051

Publicado 2025-07-23

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Este trabalho está licenciado sob uma licença Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Resumo

In our present article, we first offer a critical review of the pragmatic conception of science and how this doctrine has evolved to the present day. Secondly, we propose to examine the model-target relationship whose epistemic value has been questioned by some advocates of the pragmatic view. One of the main goals of the paper is to show that including the model-target relationship in some particular context —for example in the inferential view of models—, is not at all incompatible with the pragmatic conception. On the other hand, we examine the relationship between pragmatism and fictionalism in the context of model building. Regarding this issue, we reject the position we have called full fictionalism and assume a deflationary attitude, a narrow fictionalism that admits only one class of non-realistic components of a model: those that refer to no existing entities.

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