Many take science to provide exact laws and as striving to complete a unified and exact picture of an objectively given world. In the last decade a competing view describes science as providing models of limited parts of the world, where the models describe only in limited respects and with limited degrees of accuracy. Prior work by a number of investigators suggest that this "model view" gives a much more accurate account than do traditional approaches of the intellectual product of science as it is actually practiced. However, many believe that the model view nonetheless faces crippling difficulties.
This project will show that when one takes the model view as an account of the intellectual product of science as it is actually practiced, the objections can each be met or shown to be misplaced. It will be concluded that as an account of science as practiced the model view gives a better account than traditional approaches which describe science as providing us with theories composed of exact laws.
The claim that the model view also provides us with the best available account of the (intellectual) aims of science is more contentious. Traditional approaches endorse "convergent realism", the view that science seeks to fill in an increasingly accurate, comprehensive and unified description of the objectively given world. The project will examine certain objections to this traditional view and show that when they are met the model view also provides the most plausible picture of the intellectual aims of science. The view to be advocated maintains that limited models give us real and objective, though always limited, understanding of restricted parts of the world and that we reasonably remain agnostic about the idea that what objectively exists is something which also could be given a completely unified and humanly accessible description.
