Pragmatic-Model-Based Reasoning

Although traditional philosophy of science, facing anti-science challenges from inside and outside, has been insisted on rationality, it has no capabilities to put forward alternative views of science regarding science itself and its structure. It would be advisable to find an alternative way: examine scientists' cognitive process for justifying scientific reasoning's rationality.In fact, at the height of the naturalized epistemology comes a new notion of scientific reasoning, namely Model-Based Reasoning (MBR), with an effort to restructure the process of scientific discovery. MBR argues that scientific reasoning is semantic process in which models are created and manipulated, and that mental modeling becomes a form of human's reasoning.In the circle of traditional philosophy of science, Hans Reichenbach, a logical positivist, drew a clear line between the context of discovery and the context of justifying, and his interests lied not in the thought process but in relations between theories and facts; on the other hand, the logical positivist wanted to separate science form metaphysic by verification. However their philosophy is too simple to touch the problems of scientific discovery. In the contrary, one of the main aims for MBR is to uncover the process of scientific discovery, including it in the range of philosophy of science again.When it comes to reasoning, we mean deduction or induction and the view that if the antecedent is correct, so is the conclusion. The truth is that, contrary to the view above, good reasoning might lead to wrong answers, even no answer at all. As a form of reasoning different from traditional logic, MBR is aiming to deal with such difficulties above.But although we hope that MBR would be a common hypothesis, exploring its use in other context, MBR is facing some challenges. For example, as a presumption, "continuum hypothesis" is dismissed as a misunderstanding of Kuhn's theory for the reason that it might confuse science with common sense.Rather than focusing on a duality relationship between model and its represented world, we look to a trinary relationship; in other words, we would add a third place S to a two-place relationship between X and W. Here S can be an individual scientist, a scientific group, or a larger scientific community. W is an aspect of the real world. So, more informally, the relationship to be investigated has the form: Scientists use X to represent some aspect of the world.In a word, in the framework of pragmatic representing, we combine contextualism with MBR to extend MBR to PMBR(Pragmatic-Model-Based Reasoning, PMBR). As such, on the one hand, we respond to the criticism regarding structuralism and cognitive interpretation of Kuhn's theory. On the other hand, we can view PMBR as extension of MBR to other fields of philosophy of science:First, PMBR becomes a platform to integrate mind, language and world, paving a way to synergy between cognition and logic. Second, given that intention is preserved in PBMR, PBMR would provide a justification for normativity of naturalized epistemology.