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Cited by 802

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 21 of the 21 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

How Models Are Used to Represent Reality

Giere, Ronald N.·2004·Philosophy of Science
DOI 10.1086/425063
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Abstract

Most recent philosophical thought about the scientific representation of the world has focused on dyadic relationships between language-like entities and the world, particularly the semantic relationships of reference and truth. Drawing inspiration from diverse sources, I argue that we should focus on the pragmatic activity of representing, so that the basic representational relationship has the form: Scientists use models to represent aspects of the world for specific purposes. Leaving aside the terms “law” and “theory,” I distinguish principles, specific conditions, models, hypotheses, and generalizations. I argue that scientists use designated similarities between models and aspects of the world to form both hypotheses and generalizations.

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Metadata

Authors
Giere, R. N.
Venue
Philosophy of Science
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Published
2004-12
Volume
71
Issue
5
Pages
742-752
ISSN
  • 0031-8248 (ISSN-L)
  • 1539-767X
DOI
10.1086/425063
OpenAlex
W2174159946
Cited by
802
References
21
FWCI
78.09
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: How Models Are Used to Represent Reality. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/425063
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Giere, R. N. (2004). How Models Are Used to Represent Reality. Philosophy of Science. https://doi.org/10.1086/425063

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.