TJ Perkins (University of Calgary)
Bas van Fraassen’s book, Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective (2008) addresses what he takes to be one of the central aims of science: representation. However, instead of merely asking, ‘what is representation?’ van Fraassen shifts the question to, “how does this or that representation represent, and how does it succeed?” (33). Built into van Fraassen’s account of representation are pragmatic elements, or, how and why representations are used to achieve certain aims, and a lengthy section on how measurement procedures operate, among others. Measurement, according to van Fraassen, is “an operation that locates an item (already classified as in the domain of a given theory) in a logical space (provided by the theory to represent a range of possible states or characteristics of such items)” (164). It would seem here that measurements are made in a logical space determined by one guiding theory. However, much of van Fraassen’s exploration of scientific representation appeals to modeling and representational practices in quantum mechanics and physics; sciences which are heavily, if not exclusively, mathematical in nature. For this poster I would like to consider some of the concepts and ideas in Scientific Representation as they apply to sciences which have not garnered the same attention as physics and other mathematized sciences – specifically paleontology and ecology. Representations of phenomena are built from measurements of these paleontological and ecological data. In these sciences sophisticated measurement and modelling techniques have been developed to address questions of exceedingly complex systems in the case of ecology, and sparse evidential inferencing in the case of paleontology. These epistemic situations place constraints onto the ways in which theory influences the logical space referenced by van Fraassen. How does measurement work in more speculative scientific representational systems, where ‘the’ theory in question is not actually one theory, but many, and are not strictly speaking locating items in a logical space, but are more loosely appealed to, or playing a guiding role in some inference or justification? I will provide instances in the practice of paleontologists and ecologists which utilize theory differently from the physical and quantum sciences, often utilizing many theories into one logical space, as opposed to one theory creating the logical space. From these examples I hope to provide fuller account of scientific representation which makes an allowance for more than the mathematical sciences. van Fraassen has undoubtedly and ingeniously laid the ground work for understanding scientific representation broadly, however, there is room for forgotten or ignored sciences to enable revisions to that account.
