Research On The Constitution Problem Of Scientific Representation

The problem of “how scientific models represent the real world" has been concerned by researchers of philosophy of science.Scientists research on the nature of models to reveal the reality world.Although the role of models in philosophy of science has changed several times,it still played an important role in scientific discovery and theory building.This paper argued for the inferential conception of scientific representation and trying to answer the constitution problem of scientific representation.The domain of "scientific representation problem" is so wide that different scholars construct this problem in different ways and research on different problems.According to the description of scientific representation by Callender,the problem of scientific representation can divided into three parts: the demarcation problems of scientific representation,the constitution problems of scientific representation and the normative problems of scientific representation.When it comes to the problem of scientific representation,it generally refers to the problem of "On what models represent the word",which is the basic problem of scientific representation,therefore,the main problem of this paper is the constitution problem of scientific representation.The Similarity conception is the main view in relationship conceptions,which regards the relationship between representation models and target system(i.e.model and world)as the answer to the problem of scientific representation.The inferential conception rely on the surrogative reasoning of the science models,and take it as the answer of the problem of scientific representation.Although different versions of the relationship conception and the inferential conception have different theoretical points,they are the two main ways to solve the constitution problem of scientific representation: one is to appeal to the facts about models,the world and relationships between them;the other is the epistemic function of models.The similarity conception is criticized for logic problems and Misrepresentation problems,while the inferential conception pays more attention to the model's agency reasoning ability,which provides a new method for the constitution problem of scientific representation.On the basis of demonstrating the rationality of the inferential conception,this paper puts forward a substantial explanation of the inferential conception.The substantial inferential conception adds the restriction to the relationship between models and the world to solve the problem of Misrepresentation and scientific case explanation.It is more reasonable to explain scientific representation in scientific practice and pay more attention to model epistemic function.