book cover features art by Meredith Woolnough
Idealizations are assumptions made without regard for whether they are true and often with full knowledge they are false. Physicists sometimes assume a surface is a frictionless plane, or that gases are 'ideal' or 'perfect.' Biologists sometimes assume a population of animals is infinite in size. And economists sometimes assume humans are perfectly rational agents. These are all idealizations.
In this book, I motivate a strong view of idealizations' centrality to science, and I reconsider the aims of science in light of that centrality. On the account I develop, science does not pursue truth directly, but instead aims to support human cognitive and practical ends. Those are projects to which idealizations can directly contribute in a number of ways.
The first three chapters are used to develop my account of idealization's central role in science. In Chapter One, I discuss how science is shaped by its human practitioners and by the world's complexity. Together, these two ideas inspire a view of science as the search for causal patterns, a search that relies heavily on idealizations. Idealizations contribute to science in a variety of ways, including by playing a positive representational role. These ideas are developed in Chapter Two. In Chapter Three, I detail case studies that demonstrate the ubiquity of idealization in science, as well as the wide range of purposes it serves.
The last four chapters explore the implications of this account of idealization for central philosophical debates about the aims of science. Chapter Four motivates the idea that the epistemic aim of science is not truth but human understanding. Understanding is a cognitive achievement, and, unlike truth, it can be directly furthered by idealizations. In Chapter Five, I develop an account of scientific explanation that does justice to how the production of understanding depends on human cognizers. Then, in Chapter Six, I challenge classic conceptions of scientific levels of organization and develop a view that better accords with idealized representation across all fields of science. Finally, Chapter Seven shows how this account of idealization and the aims of science expands the influence of human characteristics and values on science's aims and products, while also constraining scientific and metaphysical pluralism.