Abstract
For T.S. Kuhn in his Postscript to Scientific Revolutions and R. Giere recently science is as a cluster of models that is produced and expands from a few pro-typical cases. Both, they are against any seeking of common characteristics that could function as “necessary and sufficient conditions” of membership in the cluster, leaving the scientific community as the final judge of what constitutes a problem for a specific science. With a sketchy examination of Galileo’s work on motion I try to show that two models could belong to same cluster, not because they share common characteristics, but because the one is a limiting case of the other. In this case, we can have rules of transformation that although are not logical are nevertheless “objective” and rigorous. Moreover, such a context reframe the problem of when a model is a good representation of a physical system.
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Raisis, V. (1999). Expansion and Justification of Models: the Exemplary Case of Galileo Galilei. In: Magnani, L., Nersessian, N.J., Thagard, P. (eds) Model-Based Reasoning in Scientific Discovery. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4813-3_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4813-3_10
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