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Blog migration

Now that I have a personal space on my institution's website, I decided to migrate this blog in order to have more control and independence. I also decided to unify all my research blogs. Here is the link to this new blog :

Possible Situations Blog

Therefore, this space will not be updated anymore, but I'll leave it as it is until Blogger reclaims it.

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Posts les plus consultés de ce blog

Modalities in Scientific Representation

The aim of this blog is to present the result of my Marie Skłodowska-Curie research project "Modalities in Scientific Representation", realised in Madrid between September 2021 and December 2023 (which was in direct continutation with my project realised at UNAM between 2019-2023). A large spectrum of discourse in science is typically analysed in modal terms, that is, in terms of what is possible or necessary. This includes scientific explanations, physical laws and constraints, causation, counterfactual reasoning and probabilities. There is a large amount of literature on the metaphysics of natural necessity in science at a general level, with proposed analyses in terms of governing laws of nature, or dispositions, etc. However, necessity comes in many varieties and other kinds of modalities than natural necessity are involved in scientific discourse. This is certainly the case for epistemic modality, involved, for example, in assessing the credibility of a hypothesis, bu...
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Communal Norms of Representation are Conceptual

The thrust of the previous post is that there are two main levels of analysis when discussing representation in science: relevance and accuracy, or what a representation is about and what it says. Let us focus first on conditions of relevance. Consider any model M , and any object O . The question I want to ask is: in what sense might we say that it is possible that M represents O , or that it must be so (independently of whether it represents it well )? We should first dispell an ambiguity in this question. Are we talking in general, or in a particular context? I have argued in my past research ( Ruyant 2021 ) that there is an important difference between two senses of “represent”: either it refers to norms at play in the epistemic community (such as: the Lotka-Volterra model represents a prey-predator system), or it refers to a specific use in context (the model of the pendulum that I’m using represents the oscillation of my clock). However, the first sense is generally more...
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Objective and subjective modalities

Remember our list of kinds of modalities from the previous post: Logico-conceptual (Bachelor cannot be married) Epistemic (she might be at home) Metaphysical (water molecules are of the H2O kind) Natural (heavy objects must fall) Deontic (she must work tonight) Practical (we could use wood to build this plane) The two first modalities above, epistemic and logico-conceptual, are often thought to be mind-dependent or subjective, while the two next ones, metaphysical and natural, are mind-independent or objective (as for the two last ones, let us put them aside for now). Objective modalities are often used in order to analyse explanations or causation. These are the ones typically involved in counterfactual talk (if you had got up earlier, you woudn't have missed your train), although sometimes conceptual necessities are thus expressed as well (if he were a bachelor, he wouldn't be married). The distinction between objective and subjective modalities could be understood as...
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