Abstract
For many decades since the constitution of philosophy of science as a more or less autonomous discipline at the beginning of this century, philosophers of science had not paid much attention to the essentially approximative nature of empirical science, i.e. to the fact that there is no such thing as an exact empirical theory (unless it is completely trivial) . This fact was mostly seen as a rather unimportant, accidental feature of empirical knowledge a kind of “noise” we could forget about when trying to unveil the essential structure of science. Since the mid seventies this evaluation of inaccuracy in science has gradually changed. Philosophers of science of different schools and using different methods have become increasingly concerned with the issue, quite independently of their idiosyncratic epistemological views. In particular, two notions have become the focus of much attention: idealization and approximation. They are seen as quite central for an adequate explication of inaccuracy in science.
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References
Balzer, W., Moulines, C.U., and Sneed, J.D. (1987) An Architectonic for Science — the Structuralist Program, Dordrecht, Chap.VII.
Moulines, C.U. (1976) Approximate Application of Empirical Theories: A General Explication. Erkenntnis, 10/II, pp. 201–227.
Moulines, C.U., and Straub, R. (1994) Approximation and Idealization from the Structuralist Point of View. Kuokkanen, M. (ed.) Structuralism, Idealization and Approximation, Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi, pp. 25–47.
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© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Moulines, C.U. (1996). Structuralist Models, Idealization, and Approximation. In: Hegselmann, R., Mueller, U., Troitzsch, K.G. (eds) Modelling and Simulation in the Social Sciences from the Philosophy of Science Point of View. Theory and Decision Library, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8686-3_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8686-3_9
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