Metaphorical Modeling And Idealization In Scientific Representation

As an important method of scientific representation,metaphor and model have recently been paid more and more attention by scientists,and metaphorical modeling in scientific representation has gradually become an important topic for scientific philosophers to study.To construct scientific models based on metaphorical thinking is a special way for scientists to represent the world,which plays a key role in scientific interpretation and scientific innovation.Scientific representation is inevitably concerned in the context,so it is fundamentally contextual.The context is an ontological reality,therefore,the research on metaphorical modeling under the paradigm of the contextual realism is of great guiding significance for our research of the scientific philosophy.It is noteworthy that metaphorical modeling is an approximate or idealized representation of the real world,which fully reflects the divergence and creativity of human thought,therefore,it is a necessary complement to the traditional representational mode.Essentially,this kind of idealization process,to some extent,reflects the methodological characteristics of the scientific representation.At the same time,the theoritical claims based on idealization is a special kind of counterfactuals in the logical form.To understand the logical characteristics of the counterfactuals,will facilitate us to grasp the essence of the idealization and further to explore the confirmation of idealized assumptions.Firstly,the conceptualization of metaphor does not only embody the universality of experience,but also imply the diversity with the context changes.The process of the metaphorical conceptualization reflects the mechanism of metaphorical meaning making,namely: abstraction and schema.And the conceptual system produced by this kind of cognitive process is hierarchical,so,the representation of either metaphors or models embodies some kind of hierarchy.At the same time,on the basis of the role of context in the scientific representaion,both the metaphorical representation and the modeling representation are concerned with the context,the contextual relevance is characterized by dynamic hierarchy in the representational system.Secondly,the analysis to the metaphorical modeling means that metaphors and models are combined in the overall context of the scientific representation.In essence,metaphorical modeling is a kind of scientific modeling practice based on the metaphorical reasoning,which is characterized by these features: the contextual relevance,the dynamic hierarchy and the theory construction.Whereas the context is a kind of reality in ontology,the analyse to the metaphorical modeling based on the contextual realism will reflect in three aspects: the intentionality from the subject of metaphorical modeling,the veracity of the metaphorical modeling iteself,the realism about the object of the metaphorical modeling.Thirdly,it always introduces idealization method in the metaphorical modeling.In fact,scientific logic essentially contains the logic of the idealization.On the one hand,the methodological characteristics of the idealization lies in the fact that the idealization stands for a kind of intentional simplified representation to the system.And the idealized models of scientific metaphors are just a kind of simplified representation to the target system based on the similarity.In the relationship of the idealization,models can be described as a partial world about an intentional relationship structure.On the other hand,in the logic,the metaphorical statements based on the idealization can be regarded as a special kind of counterfactuals,meanwhile,the logic of the idealization is nonclassical,which will be embodied in the non-monotonicity of the conditionals with the idealization logic.Finally,the counterfactuals based on the idealization have reasonable verifiability.According to the inference to the best explaination,the confirmation to the idealized counterfactuals is realized by seeking for the best explaination to the observed phenomenon.At the same time,the counterfactuals are consistent with various scientific interpretive practices and additional methodological specifications.So,the metaphorical modelling based on the idealization is consistent with the scientific realism.In conclusion,to investigate the metaphorical modeling based on contextualism,is not only an inevitable requirement,but also an unique perspective in the contemporary philosohpy of science;to combine the scientific metaphors and the scientifc models in the methodological framenwork of idealization fully embodies the scientific rationality in methodology and in logic.Meanwhile,as a kind of the confirmation theory to the idealized hypothesis,the inference to the best explaination lays a foundation for us to grasp the verifiability of the idealized hypothesis and its verifiability conditions.