Justin Price (University of South Carolina)
Kendall Waltons' pretense theory of fiction has recently seen application to analysis of scientific models by Roman Frigg and Adam Toon. However, Walton's pretense theory provides a problematic interpretation of assertions referring to fictional characters and places. This feature transfers to Frigg and Toon's analysis of models, leading to a problematic interpretation of what Fiora Salis calls model-world comparison, and what I call model-model comparisons. This problematic interpretation confounds Frigg and Toon's ability to account for learning through models. My contribution is to point out that these same features of the pretense account make it inadequate for depicting model transfer. I provide an example of model transfer in chemistry to motivate this point. Amie Thomasson's artifactualist account of fiction avoids the problematic interpretations while retaining the virtues of a pretense theory. We should take an artifactualist approach in analysing models as fictions.
