Do fictions explain?
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Do fictions explain? James Nguyen1,2,3 Received: 1 April 2019 / Accepted: 20 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract I argue that fictional models, construed as models that misrepresent certain ontological aspects of their target systems, can nevertheless explain why the latter exhibit certain behaviour. They can do this by accurately representing whatever it is that that behaviour counterfactually depends on. However, we should be sufficiently sensitive to different explanatory questions, i.e., ‘why does certain behaviour occur?’ versus ‘why does the counterfactual dependency invoked to answer that question actually hold?’. With this distinction in mind, I argue that whilst fictional models can answer the first sort of question, they do so in an unmysterious way (contra to what one might initially think about such models). Moreover, I claim that the second question poses a dilemma for the defender of the idea that fictions can explain: either these models cannot answer these sorts of explanatory questions, precisely because they are fictional; or they can, but in a way that requires reinterpreting them such that they end up accurately representing the ontological basis of the counterfactual dependency, i.e., reinterpreting them so as to rob them of their fictional status. Thus, the existence of explanatory fictions does not put pressure on the idea that accurate representation of some aspect of a target system is a necessary condition on explaining that aspect. Keywords Models · Fictions · Representation · Explanation
1 Introduction Suppose someone asks you why the difference between high and low tide, the tidal range, changes throughout the lunar month. You might answer that it’s the relative positions of the sun, the moon, and the earth that explain this difference. Depending
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James Nguyen [email protected]
1
Institute of Philosophy, University of London, London, UK
2
Department of Philosophy, University College London, London, UK
3
Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
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Synthese
on the lunar cycle, either the sun and the moon are positioned in such a way as to ensure that their gravitational forces align, thus producing spring tides (the tidal effect of the sun and the moon reinforce each other), or their force vectors are at right-angles to one-another, thereby producing neap tides (the smaller solar tidal effect is orthogonal to the larger lunar effect). Spring tides are higher (at high tide, and lower at low tide) than neap tides, so during spring tides the tidal range is greater than during neap tides. I think that this explains why the tidal range varies across the lunar month. But there is a complication. This answer involves a ‘fiction’. There’s no such thing as Newtonian gravitation. From our current perspective the ocean isn’t acted on by a gravitational force; it’s just trying to ‘go straight in a crooked world’ (Bokulich 2016, p. 273).1 Nevertheless, it doesn’t seem detrimental to the model that it i
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