Justifying Distortion: How Biologists Use Idealized Models to Explain

Guest speaker: Collin Rice, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Bryn Mawr College

It is typically assumed that science aims to tell us what the world is really like. However, many scientific explanations make essential use of idealized models that misrepresent or distort the real world in a variety of ways. In this talk, I use examples from ecology, population genetics, and cell biology to argue against various attempts to justify idealizations by showing that they are harmless distortions of irrelevant features. Instead, these cases suggest that we ought to characterize idealized models as providing holistically (i.e., pervasively) distorted representations. I then argue that we can justify the use of these biological models by identifying universal patterns that are stable across a range of real, possible, and model systems. This enables us to see how biologists can be so successful at using pervasively distorted models to explain real-world phenomena.

Friday, February 18, 2022
4 – 5:30 p.m. MST

Questions? Contact jeff.kasser@colostate.edu