Abstracts

`Fiction Science'

The importance of introducing ctions and distortions in scienti c theory and practice is an old adagio in philosophy of science that, over the last few years, has regained the center of the stage. Various authors have recently discussed the importance of abstraction (the intentional omission of detail) and idealization (the deliberate misrepresentation of detail) in scienti c models and scienti c representations. These two important practices are often clashed together and addressed as a single feature. This, I argue, is a mistake. By presenting and discussing simple examples from biology, and economics, I argue that while abstraction can be straightforwardly reconciled with `standard' accounts of sci- enti c representation; however, idealization generates sui generis puzzles that make it harder to accommodate it within extant conceptions of scienti c mod- eling. In conclusion, after discussing the importance of `multiple-models ideal- ization' in science, I diagnose the problem as a failure to distinguish between two general goals of scienti c explanations: generality and accuracy|another vintage philosophical moral that, however, if all too often ignored.