EGENIS seminar: "Themes from Inference and Representation" Prof Mauricio Suarez (Complutense University of Madrid)

I review some of the main themes in the book I just published for University of Chicago Press, entitled Inference and Representation: A Study in Modeling Science. I focus in particular on the emergence of the modeling attitude in 19th century science and the claimed use of models in practice, with special emphasis on theoretical models in physics and evolutionary biology. I extract some of the consequences of taking an inferential deflationary approach to modeling and discuss some implications for the realism-antirealism debate.