Realism About Missing Systems

Abstract

Abstract It is by now a familiar fact about scientific practice that scientists of many stripes devote considerable time and energy to describing and imagining systems that cannot be found in the world around us—the simple pendulum in classical mechanics, say. Missing-systems modeling is scientific modeling that involves this sort of imagining. Missing-systems modeling is puzzling in a number of respects, and some philosophers have pursued the fiction approach to understanding it. The fiction approach seeks to construct an account of missing-systems modeling by drawing parallels between the relevant modeling discourse and ordinary discourse about novels, short stories, plays, fiction films, and the like. This chapter develops a new version of the fiction approach that draws on Amie Thomasson’s work on the semantics and ontology of fiction, the abstract artifacts account of missing-systems modeling. On this account, simple pendula (say) are abstract artifacts created by physicists over a certain period in the history of classical mechanics. This chapter shows how the abstract artifact account makes sense of the puzzling features of missing-systems modeling, presents and responds to three objections to the account, and discusses some advantages of drawing on the de re version of Thomasson’s account of fiction, in particular, when developing an account of missing-systems modeling.

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