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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:02.798)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Mauricio Suarez, full professor in logic and philosophy of science at Computent University of Madrid. And we're here to talk about his book, Inference and Representation, a Study in Modeling Science. Dr. Suarez, wonderful to have you here today.
Mauricio Suárez (00:25.1)
Thank you so much for the invitation. It's very nice to be here.
PJ (00:28.952)
So tell me, Dr. Suarez, why this book?
Mauricio Suárez (00:33.004)
All right, so this is book that I have been writing for a very long time. I started working on this book over 20 years ago now. So it has been long in the making and it really takes account of most of what I have done in the philosophy of science over the years concerning models and modeling in science.
So it has a long history. It's very much part of my intellectual biography by now. It started off as a kind of outshot of my PhD thesis. I wrote my PhD thesis at the LSE many years ago now at the London School of Economics, that is. And while I was finishing my PhD thesis on the foundations of quantum mechanics,
This professor was visiting at the time, LSE, Ray Hughes, who then became quite well known for a seminal article entitled Models and Representation. It was published in Philosophy of Science, the journal, about 24, 25 years ago now. And that was an article that had an impact on me. And I kept thinking about this topic. And eventually I came to decide that I had a view.
on the topic that I could defend that had not been defended before as regards models. And eventually all that crystallized very slowly. It was a very slow process, the making of this book, but eventually crystallized in a book. At some point, the University of Chicago Press showed some interest in the book. I guess from that point onwards, I was quite certain that I was going to publish a book with them on this topic.
and it took a life of its own from that point onwards.
PJ (02:36.088)
So real quick, I missed who is the author of that article that Professor, you heard speak.
Mauricio Suárez (02:41.312)
Yeah, that's Rick Hughes. He was a really interesting character, passed away a few years ago now. He was British. He, for a long time, worked as a teacher in North London School, eventually became interested in philosophy academically. Wrote a couple of influential books on the foundations of quantum mechanics. That's how I came across him.
I was very interested in that topic for my PhD thesis. But when I got to meet him, he was already interested in something else he had moved on. He was working on, he's actually working on philosophical hermeneutics for science. He ended up producing a book, the last book that he wrote, it's a really interesting treatise on how to approach scientific texts. Very unusual book in the philosophy of science with a very continental philosophy angle.
on the material, which is very unusual in the film. So I followed him up, I read all his works, I got to know him very well, we became friends. He certainly was influential in this very low-key way, which he was a very placid man, slow but sure thinker.
And I picked up habits from him and I picked up interests from him. So intellectually, this tells you a little bit the story of the book. Then we could go into the intellectual reasons why the book is there in the first place. What is the book doing intellectually in the philosophy of science? But from a biographical point of view, this is really the history of the book tells you how I came up with this idea, how I came up with this book in the first place.
PJ (04:30.442)
Absolutely, and I would love to hear kind of how it fits in intellectually. It's a fascinating approach. I love that you've taken this kind of deflationary view because it does sometimes like it seems like a very bold book, like you are approaching like like a whole topic in a whole new way, but you keep it within its bounds. Sometimes you can have books like this that are like
If it wasn't deflationary, you're like, feel like this is a little too much, right? But it makes sense. The project is useful and it has its limits. And I'm really excited about it. Talk to us a little bit about the history in the 20th century of the syntactic view of science as far as representation goes, and then how your view here is.
Mauricio Suárez (05:10.146)
Thank you.
PJ (05:26.734)
is different.
Mauricio Suárez (05:29.078)
Yeah, so, I mean, first of all, thanks a for that comment about the book being original yet within bounds. I think that gets to some of my intent when I was writing this book. I wanted to come up with an original view, but I didn't want it to be a crazy view. I wanted a view that was acceptable and convincing and plausible to most people working in the field. And I worked hard to make it compatible with different
PJ (05:46.21)
Hahaha
Mauricio Suárez (05:58.488)
views that are now nowadays widely shared and I worked hard to make it to make it rooted to make sure that it was rooted in the history of the discipline and then I took pains to go through different argumentative moves in order to make sure that I could convince the reader that this is a plausible view to hold. So I think that's a very good description of the intent of the book. To say something
rather original to come at the topic from a very original angle that has not really been tried before, but to do that within the bounds of what is the philosophical debate and to therefore be convincing for mainstream philosophy of science scholars. that's a very good, I thought that was a very good way of describing the intent of the book. Yeah, so there's something called the syntactic view of scientific theories.
which has a long history and a very spectacular pedigree because it has been defended by many of the most important and leading philosophers of science of the 20th century, including some of the leading logical empiricists of the middle of 20th century. So you find this view of theories in the works of people like Ernst Nagel, Rudolf Carnap, or Hans Reichenbach.
and some of their disciples in North America. These are the first generation logical empiricists who emigrated from Vienna and the Vienna Circle onto the United States right about the time of the Second World War and beforehand. And then they created a school that became very dominant in American philosophy and American analytical philosophy through a number of disciples and many of them also.
held this view of scientific theory. The view basically says that a scientific theory is a bunch of statements, statements written down in some sort of logically structured language, some kind of logical language. And the theory is just the conjunction of all those statements and anything that may follow from that conjunction. So all the axioms of the theory, you want, and the theorems of the theory make up this
Mauricio Suárez (08:24.396)
composite body of statements that we can call a scientific theory. And it has to satisfy a number of requirements, such as it has to be, well, has to be consistent, it has to be able to account for phenomena and be empirically adequate and so on. So there were a number of properties of theories so understood that were discussed for a long time. And this was the dominant paradigm for how to think about a scientific theory in the wake of this logical and persistent movement.
and it was very much cast in a linguistic mode. So a theory was essentially a piece of language, some sort of language structure logically in some kind of way. Now that view came to be superseded by a different view of scientific theory that we call, often referred to as the semantic view.
And there is some debate as to how precise or useful these terms actually are. Because the syntactic view is not just syntactic, it's also an interpretation of the syntax. And the semantic view is not just semantic, but it's also appealing to mathematical structures and so on. So there's some debate about whether these names are maybe misnomers, whether they're appropriate. But in any case, there's a difference between these two views. On the syntactic view, the theory is just
a bunch of statements in some particular language. On the semantic view, a theory is a set of structures or a set of models or representations, a set of entities rather than bits of language, objects that have as a primary role the role of representing the world. And the theory is some kind of set of those representational entities. So there's a shift.
here, there are of course, at around the 1970s, 1980s, where this semantic view takes hold. And from that point onwards, the key to the function of scientific theories and models is no longer description, which is a linguistic category, but representation, which is, if you want, metalinguistic or supralinguistic category. And so suddenly in the 80s and 90s, the
Mauricio Suárez (10:52.246)
the concept of representation gains new ground and philosophers begin to be interested in this concept. And this actually sums up very much the trajectory of Rick Hughes, this philosopher that influenced me so much that I was talking about before, because he started off as a defender of the semantic view and ended up very interested in the topic of representation. It's a kind of natural topic of interest if you come from a semantic view account of scientific theories.
So in a way, many of us got interested in representation in the wake of this semantic view of theories, but there were also other elements, which I talk about in the book, that made us interested in this concept in the first place. And some of them have historical roots in the 19th century and so on. I talk a little bit about the history of this concept in the book. So it's a complex history and a coalescence of interests coming from different quarters. And suddenly, we all become interested in this notion, representation.
How is it that scientific theories and models represent bits of the world or their target systems? How do they achieve this? What is the fundamental mechanism that allows them to do this? It suddenly becomes a very pressing question. And by the time I was doing my PhD in the 90s, this suddenly was a question that was in the air. And it was not for me to be thinking about.
PJ (12:15.576)
So if I understand correctly, I mean, you're defending representation, but you're doing it by appealing to, and I'm using these terms pretty ignorantly, but there's this emphasis on the pragmatist and deflationary accounts of these. Can you talk about how, and I was actually very, I was pleased, I was reading the introduction and I was like, this sounds like something that Richard Rorty would take issue with. And then he popped up and I was like,
Okay, all right. I am somewhat on the right track. know, like there's his book on the mirror escapes me right now, the exact title. so you're taking it, you're taking from the pragmatist line of philosophy, and you're applying it here. So how do you mesh representation with pragmatism and deflationary?
Mauricio Suárez (13:08.44)
Yeah, I mean, that's really gets to the heart of the project in the book. It's a wonderful question. We could be here talking about this for hours.
PJ (13:17.998)
That is a real problem with this. You can never fit it all in an hour, but we'll try our best,
Mauricio Suárez (13:26.009)
You're right, we'll try our best. So basically, when I came to this topic, representation, people were pretty much hooked up on notions of representation that were referential. And that's partly, I think, kind of derivative consequence of coming from the syntactic view and the linguistic account of scientific theories, that you would think that the fundamental relation of representation between theories and the world has to be some kind of reference.
PJ (13:39.075)
Mm-hmm.
Mauricio Suárez (13:55.276)
So the central terms of scientific theories must refer some entities out there and describe them in different ways. And a theory approaches a true description of those things in as much as it pronounces itself in an accurate way about that entity which it refers to. So all these categories are all very metaphysical. If you start thinking about them, reference is a metaphysical category, a metaphysical property, the bits of our language may have taken.
refer to things out there in a pre-existing reality that exists independently of our conceptions of it and so on. There's quite a lot of metaphysical realism imported into this picture. And from the work I wanted to move away from these views that were so metaphysically loaded, I wanted to have an account that was closer to scientific practice and that it didn't import so many philosophical notions onto the scientific practice.
I wanted in a way to let the scientific practice speak for itself, rather than imposing some kind of philosophical framework upon the practice, rather than imposing this kind of metaphysics of referential relations on the scientific practice. And at the time when I started working on this, this was quite a novel approach. mean, not many people had this kind of pragmatist approach. I think it's becoming a lot more common.
nowadays, partly in the wake of growing interest amongst philosophers of science on the practice of science as practice, qua practice, as opposed to trying to describe it in some kind of philosophically antecedent way. People are now interested in what scientists actually do and just trying to get a grip on what they do independently of any pre-existing philosophical position. So that really times in with my attempts over the years to
get to a notion of representation that is deflationary and pragmatist, that is, that it doesn't involve any heavy-duty metaphysics. I'm not sure that you can completely move away from all metaphysics because there are some fundamental notions of relation and property that you need to employ in order to describe what a scientific model does and how it describes the world or its target system. But...
Mauricio Suárez (16:20.244)
you can get away from the heavy duty metaphysical notions of reference and appropriate true description and pre-existing reality capturing our models and so on. So really the whole approach is you begin with the scientific practice and then you build the philosophical account upwards as it were from this practice. You don't begin with a pre-existing philosophical position and try to impose it.
on the practice or just use the practice as a benchmark to figure out how appropriate that philosophical conception is. And that's where the deflationism and the pragmatism come in. That's the role that the deflationary and pragmatist attitude is allowing you to play. In the pragmatist tradition, it has been natural to be mistrustful of these big philosophical categories and dichotomies. And instead, pragmatist philosophers have traditionally attempted
to understand the practice first and foremost, and then build philosophical conceptions upon that practice. And so I'm following suit, and I'm following this long-standing philosophical tradition of which Rorty was part, one part amongst many other parts, and there are many different versions of philosophical pragmatism out there. I, in my work, was more directly influenced by Hilary Putnam's pragmatism, more so I would say than Richard Rorty's.
PJ (17:39.299)
Hmm
Mauricio Suárez (17:48.684)
but they're both towering pragmatist figures when I was starting to work on this. obviously I paid attention to both of them. And there are some similarities, but they never really wrote much on representation. They weren't that interested in the concept, think, partly because they hadn't really, they were a previous generation of philosophers and they were more in tune with this syntactic conception of theory. So representation didn't have this,
huge role for Hilary Putnam. And for Rorty, representation is a very big concept, but it's a philosophical concept. It's springs out of Descartes. And so I wanted to focus on representation as a scientific activity, specifically.
PJ (18:34.56)
Right, yeah, believe he's attacking Descartes and Kant quite a bit, Kant's idea of the transcendent.
Thank you. Great answer. Two things come to mind. One is how much I appreciate you building from the scientist up. One of the things I do on this podcast is I have not only philosophers and I have historians on and I have artists on. I'm interested in philosophy of art and I am generally distrustful of any philosophy of art that does not check in with artists at least a little bit. When you talk to artists, I've talked to writers, I've talked to a master sculptor.
That was one of my probably favorite episodes. Their concerns are often very different. In fact, I say generally very different from philosophers of art, right? It really is very challenging that way. And I'm sure you've encountered that when talking to scientists.
Mauricio Suárez (19:30.678)
Yes. So that's again, a really nice point to be making in the context of this book that I have written because I have an entire chapter on the philosophy of art and comparing the notion of representation in art and the notion of representation in science. And that's because I completely take on board what you just said, that the relationship of scientists to philosophy of science is very analogous to the relationship of artists to philosophy of art.
PJ (19:43.03)
Right.
Mauricio Suárez (20:00.476)
And just as philosophers of science have often tried to scientific practice in a particular pre-existing philosophical theory, so have philosophers of art often tried to cast artistic practice in a particular philosophical theory of what art is, or what it should be. And for similar reasons, think they kind of deflationary pragmatist attitude that I defend as a philosophical attitude to have to scientific practice.
it's also, I think, appropriate, an appropriate attitude to have as a philosopher of art to sort of come humbly to the artistic practice and let the practice speak for itself before you cast it all in a kind of philosophical theory that is a kind of a straight jacket for practice. Instead of doing that, let just the practice flow and follow it wherever it would take you. And so I have a similar attitude. And I think the analogy is quite apt.
that science is to philosophy of science as art is to philosophy of art. And very many different moves are made in the philosophy of art and arguments and objections that have been made through the years to philosophical theories are also applicable to philosophical theories that apply to scientific representation. So the topic can be approached in very analogous ways. And I completely take what you mean that artists can feel disconcerted and misunderstood.
when they're described in this very lofty philosophical theories of what art is and where it aims to be. And scientists can similarly feel misunderstood and misinterpreted when cast in the framework of a particular philosophical theory of what a model is and is supposed to be doing. So I wanted to overcome this. Okay, I wanted to overcome this.
PJ (21:54.446)
Hmm.
Mauricio Suárez (21:57.356)
difficult point in the conversation between the practitioners and the philosophers in order to make the philosophy more responsive to the practice and more open-minded perhaps about our practice too. again, I think this has analogies with art and artistic work.
PJ (22:19.106)
Yeah, so, and that's, I think, leads to like the second kind of part of this. As we're talking about scientists, and if I understand, you know, the flow of your book correctly, what you're arguing for in representation is that representation is most clearly shown in the practice of modeling. And so what is modeling and what are its uses to borrow directly from chapters in your book?
So what are some examples of this and how do you define it so that it gives us that right account of thinking about this?
Mauricio Suárez (22:59.83)
Yeah, I mean, wonderful question again. So that was a very apt summary of what I do in the book, starting with the model in practice and then building a philosophical theory that accounts for it rather than the other way around. And starting with the model in practice entails, I think, that you define the essence of a model
that you define what a model is entirely in terms of what a model does or practice. So this is again where the pragmatism and the deflationism kicks in. Your definition of a model, rather than defining the entity in the abstract, ought to be entirely responsive to what the model allows its users.
to achieve in practice. And there's a long standing pragmatist tradition that takes it that the meaning of a concept is in the effects that it has in use. This goes all the way back to Charles Peirce and the original pragmatists and the pragmatist Maxim. So in a way what I'm doing in this book, and I think I mentioned Peirce here and there, is to put this pragmatist Maxim
to use in the study of models. So as opposed to asking abstractly how is it that we define a model, I suggest that we should try to get a grip on the essence, whatever essence, if it is the case that we can speak of the essence of the thing, the essence of the thing is in the practice of its use. So what we need
PJ (24:55.464)
Forgive me, real quick. It's not pragmatist, but Sartre's existence precedes essence comes to mind quite a bit. Is that a good way of talking about this?
Mauricio Suárez (25:10.136)
That's an interesting... That's somewhat in a different direction. An unsuspected direction, but I quite like it. I hadn't thought about this in existential terms. Something in that Sartrean slogan resonates indeed. Essences can only come in the wake of something that is already active out there.
PJ (25:11.662)
Maybe that was too far afield, I apologize. I just keep it, yeah.
Okay, yes
Mauricio Suárez (25:39.448)
doing things. But I'm concerned that the notion of existence in itself is already a metaphysical category. so you would have to, and you need to have to, get very involved in a pretty high minded theory of what existence objectively could be. And I wouldn't want to have to do that. my philosophical account is certainly
PJ (25:47.463)
I understand. yes.
PJ (25:58.094)
Mmm.
PJ (26:04.023)
Yes.
Mauricio Suárez (26:07.796)
less metaphysical than anything that could possibly provide. But there is similar instinct. I think you're right to point it out, that essences cannot be defined independently of what functionally objects, the objects of those essences are actually doing. And in the case of modeling and representation, this really means that you have to look into the practice of modeling.
as it is carried out by scientists and pay handsome attention to what they do in order to come up with a credible definition of what a model is. So in joking as it were the essence of what a model is to its users, I am deflating any possible philosophical account of models or the essences or the essential properties of models and turning them into just a...
a version of a pragmatist account of what they do actually achieve for us in practice.
PJ (27:08.29)
You're deflating even existence. Yes, so I was, yeah. Forgive me for interrupting. That's actually helpful though, thank you. That helps, yeah.
Mauricio Suárez (27:17.527)
us.
Yes, I mean you could say that I am deteriorating existence or you could say that I am assuming. This is how exist and I'm out there and I'm operating in certain contexts. At any rate, what I'm certainly doing is trying to avoid the question of what is existence. we get into that question, I don't think we'll move on to much else.
PJ (27:21.998)
Yeah.
PJ (27:27.766)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, right,
PJ (27:40.366)
Right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right,
Mauricio Suárez (27:50.336)
Yes. Exactly. Yes. And we didn't have enough time to write several. But anyway, that's fundamentally the idea. it's essentially a pragmatist insight. And this is why the account is pragmatic and the play story in the first place, because the instinct that drives it is to connect any sort of abstract philosophical definitions of the terms to actual practices.
PJ (27:57.804)
Hahaha
Mauricio Suárez (28:19.996)
and the norms and the rules that are operative in those practices. So it's very much a use-based account of these notions of model, theory, modeling, and so on. And this is distinctive about the account, although I again perceive that many people have moved into similar views, partly because of this shift in interests in the philosophical community towards
the practical uses of science and the practices that make up science. And so a natural corollary of that interest is to think of these concepts and these categories in a pragmatist way, which is what I do in the book. So in a way, the book is really timely. When I started writing it, didn't seem like it seemed like I was going against the mainstream or the tide, but it doesn't feel that way now. feel like the
now that book is finally coming out, it's actually coming out in a very friendly intellectual environment and it's generally being very well received, think, because of that. Because a lot of people are awored with this sort of underlying pragmatism and pragmatist attitude to scientific concepts.
PJ (29:34.894)
So what are some of the uses that you use to define modeling then?
Mauricio Suárez (29:39.392)
Yeah, all right. So, the fundamental use that all models seem to have, and this is where I defend in the book, is to allow us to think and reason in a surrogative manner about target systems, which may be existent or not. Here we come again to the question of existence, maybe real or not, but there are definite targets of models. And what models primarily do,
what is in my account, this is their only essential function or role is to allow us to reason about those target systems on the basis of the source systems are presented as the heart of the model. So there's some kind of analogical, surrogative reasoning going on in every instance of modeling. Whenever a model is being used by somebody, by some scientists in some context,
the claim that I make in the book and that I defend in the book is that there is always some sort of surrogative reasoning going on which allows the scientists to investigate the nature of the target on the basis of some of the properties of the model. So you're basically transferring your reasoning, your consequences and your study of the properties of the source of the model onto the target of the model. And that sort of transference exercise in reasoning
is essential to every kind of model. Every time that a model is put to use, it is put to use at least for that purpose. There may be other purposes that models are used for, but they don't turn out to be essential or universal. The only universal use that models are always put to in scientific practice is this use of models as tools for surrogative reasoning about a given type.
And so my claim in the book and what I defend in the book is that this is the primary and only universal use that models have in practice. It's very thin because it doesn't tell you much about what you can conclude from models. And that's completely up for grabs. And it depends on the context. And you have to go case by case thinking about the different cases of models and what is it that they provide in terms of knowledge.
Mauricio Suárez (32:02.142)
It just tells you that the model will at some point be put to use as a tool for reasoning of this analogical or surrogative kind, but it doesn't tell you much more. So philosophically, this is very thing, but I claim in the deflationist mode that this is as much as we can say generally or universally about models and their uses. They're always put to this particular use at one point or another. And this is the use I defined in the book in virtue of which they are models in the first place.
We wouldn't call them models if they couldn't help us reason in this analogical way about certain targets. So that's the fundamental central claim of the book, that this is the fundamental use of models in practice.
PJ (32:48.822)
Why do we need this surrogate of, I don't know if I can say that right, but reasoning. Why do we need, go ahead.
Mauricio Suárez (32:56.568)
Yeah, so I mean, why do scientists need models in the first place? The reason why scientists come up with models in the first place is that they have no other way to learn or gain knowledge about their target system. So one typical example of model that is often given is the simple harmonic oscillator model for pendular motion in classical physics. And there are many other models that we could talk about.
But if you take that, what that model allows you to do is from some very basic equations about a singular harmonic oscillator is just an oscillator that oscillates frequently and periodically back and forth. So from the equations that describe that motion, you can get to the description of pendular motion in real systems that are oscillating with some approximations, because it is not a perfect description.
that you have to approximate that in different ways. But that's essentially what you want the model is to provide you with knowledge about pendular systems that you couldn't possibly understand any other way. Or take more of abstruse models in ecology. I talk a lot about the Lotka Volterra model in ecology in the book. This is a model that allows you to understand the dynamics of prey and predator in a particular ecosystem.
So if you have no idea why is a certain kind of fish, for instance, is suddenly quickly disappearing in an ecosystem, you want to have some kind of model that allows you to understand what is going on and possibly predict it. And so you come up with these equations, Lotka-Volterra equations are two nonlinear equations, very simple to see them operating. And they have as a consequence that there is going to be some kind of oscillatory
sequence of the populations of prey and predator in the ecosystem. So suddenly you have a tool that you can use to understand a phenomenon that you couldn't possibly understand before and even predict what may happen in the future. Or if you take another model that I discussed a lot in the book, a model in astrophysics, we cannot see the interior of the stars. We don't know what's in there.
Mauricio Suárez (35:21.933)
But we can build models, which are approximations on the basis of physical knowledge that we have as to what may be happening in the interior of a star, what sort of combustion processes are happening there, the sort of fusion processes that take place. So we describe the interior of the star according to some model. And that model has a number of consequences that we can actually observe for the luminosity of the star and the spectral class and so on.
And these are observable consequences. They're all consequences relating to the surface layer of the star. So they're not telling you anything about what goes on inside the star. But the model does make a number of assumptions about what's going on inside the star. And so therefore, you can begin to calibrate your models to figure out, at least in some kind of approximate way, what may be going on there. So this is a piece of reasoning that we're carrying out on the basis of a model and dealt with a number of assumptions.
about processes that are fundamentally happening there but we have no access to. And that will give us a certain set of predictions that we can check against observations. And this is a very typical kind of modeling situation to find yourself in as a scientist. This is a phenomenon you don't understand the causes of. You want to try to control it and predict it in some way. You come up with a model. The assumptions in the model may be questionable.
But the model is useful if it allows you to make predictions about what will happen in the system that you're interested in in the long term. And those predictions can only be come up by means of surrogate reasoning or analogical reasoning on the basis of these models. So this is fundamentally what this uses, inferential uses of the models are giving you in practice. They're giving you some kind of handle
on a phenomenon or a situation that you cannot possibly begin to understand, but you are very interested in trying to predict it and control it. And so you come up with a model that allows you for some sort of description that has some kind of predictive power and you sort of fine tune the model until you have a model that gives you the right predictions and so on. And then from then on, just
Mauricio Suárez (37:47.53)
operate as if the model was a literally true story about the system, even though you know that many of the assumptions aren't as good thing and put in by hand. But that's the work that these models are doing for you as a scientist, what scientists they're allowing you to probe into the unknown in some way. And they give scientists confidence that they cannot this control or predict a phenomenon even
Though they may not understand fundamentally what the causes of the phenomenon are, but they have a handle on what the phenomenon would look like and how it would develop. And so it gives them a way to control and predict aspects of the phenomenon. Yeah.
PJ (38:35.662)
So forgive me for... I don't know if this direction is helpful or not, but as I'm talking through this...
PJ (38:45.826)
this surrogative reasoning.
Mauricio Suárez (38:49.59)
Yeah.
PJ (38:51.406)
is an abstraction or simplification because we are finite in time and resources. we have to have models because no one can perfectly measure, no one has an unlimited amount of time, we don't have... Literally the ability to get inside a star would require us to make models.
Mauricio Suárez (39:15.032)
And then.
PJ (39:18.668)
before we could ever even get close to being scientifically able to find out what's actually going on inside a star.
Mauricio Suárez (39:24.32)
Yeah, you can have this view. You can have the view that says, look, if we were God and we had infinite amounts of time, infinite powers of calculation and observation, infinite computing power, we could actually figure out everything that goes on in any
little corner of the universe. And I guess the so-called Laplacian view of the universe, which derives from this French mathematician in the early 19th century, was well known for having stated that if you at some point could know all the positions of all the molecules in the universe, then you could by means of Newtonian mechanics deterministically predict
everything that will happen in the future in the universe. I guess if you have this Laplacian view of the universe, then you can claim that models would be unnecessary. From this point of view, God would not need models. He would just have the perfect theory and he would run the perfect theory and calculate everything perfectly. And there would be no need for fictional approximations or idealized
approximations or abstract representations of any system because he would just have all the knowledge and he would know what's happening everywhere at any point without any need for models. So on this view, models are the kinds of tools that limited creatures like we are find that in our lifetimes and our computational powers have no option but to
sadly have to recourse to. mean, we can't... Well, sadly from the point of view of the kind of knowledge we have to be had, obviously we're not going to be able to have that knowledge, so we have to have recourse to models, which in many ways are mere approximations and contain all kinds of fictional assumptions, but it's the best that we can have. So that's one thing.
PJ (41:24.078)
It doesn't have to be sadly, I yeah, it's just who we are, right? Yeah. Yeah, I understand.
PJ (41:48.44)
So I, did I do it again? I think I did it again where I imported metaphysical assumptions and you're gonna say that you're trying to avoid this. I did it again. no. okay. So I had, okay. I see where, anyways, continue. You had more to say. Yes.
Mauricio Suárez (41:55.288)
Yes.
Mauricio Suárez (42:02.52)
Yeah, you see what I'm trying to You see what I'm trying to which is that there is another view. There is another view in which even God would need models. Because there is no way that you can have this sort of perfect amount of information that will perfectly determine what will happen. And this is partly because maybe the universe is not deterministic.
PJ (42:07.982)
Go ahead, go ahead.
PJ (42:15.022)
Hmph. Hmph.
Mauricio Suárez (42:30.306)
but also because there is no fundamental theory that tells nature how to go. And if the universe is fundamentally chaotic in this way, then even God would be in need of models. I mean, it's not a recourse that poor limited beings in tiny corner of the universe make use of. It's just a way that knowledge can be gained and acquired by any.
cognitive being and we all need models because we all need to simplify complex situations in order to make them amenable to the sort of concepts that we have and to be able to apply those concepts to those situations in ways that allow us to gain a certain degree of prediction and control and there is no limiting procedure that we can go towards that would allow us to get rid of this model.
We're always going to need models at some point or another and we're always going to have to be making these assumptions and making the simplifications and making these approximations because there is no perfect knowledge of this universe to be had. So that's more like my view because that is a kind of, if you want, we were talking about before, approaching the practice with kind of the humility of not trying to put it in or core.
course in any philosophical framework. So I don't want to make assumptions about what reality is like out there. I don't want to make assumptions about the universe being deterministic and fully predictable from the standpoint of a fully consistent scientific theory. I don't know if there is such a thing as the final unified theory of the universe. I suspect it probably...
probably won't be because we've been looking for it for a long time and we haven't found it. So it's likely that we will always need models. There's never going to be a stage in the development of human knowledge where models suddenly would disappear and everything will be Christine and clear and true. That's never going to happen. You're always going to these kind of tools for sort of head inference. You're always going to have to make use of the shortcuts and simplifications and approximations that
Mauricio Suárez (44:56.578)
part and parcel of what knowledge is, not just what we as limited human beings are, but it's part and parcel of what gaining knowledge of anything is ultimately about.
PJ (45:07.502)
So, and this is why your theory is pragmatist, because it's grounded ultimately in practice, right? That's like when you're talking about how do we know it works? Well, it lets us do things. It allows us to be accurate in our predictions, which in turns allow us to be more effective or to accomplish our goals. Is that the better, instead of getting off on, know, the policy in metaphysics.
Mauricio Suárez (45:30.71)
Yeah, that's exactly right. So I think the starting point has to be what is it that modeling achieves in practice? What are its uses? That's why I start with that kind of question. And then you have to go about building a philosophical theory that respects those uses. And that's the pragmatism. You've expressed that very well. mean, it's the idea that you don't begin with a
You don't get out of your own skin at any point when you're dealing with these models. We are human, we are limited beings, but there's nothing wrong with that standpoint. That may be just the fundamental standpoint of any cognitive entity in the universe. so therefore, aspiring to more may be ultimately a kind of search for a holy grail. A holy grail search that can only bring
desperate destitution. think we just need better off concentrating on what's the kind of epistemic and cognitive goods that we can actually achieve in practice and just focus in our philosophical discussion on what makes that possible as opposed to having a more metaphysical starting point.
PJ (46:50.584)
Well, Dr. Suarez, one, thank you so much for coming on today. I wanna be respectful of your time. If you have a brief moment, can I ask you, what are the, you say there are ramifications from this for philosophy of art. What are those ramifications for philosophy of art?
Mauricio Suárez (47:09.654)
Yeah, I mean, that's a wonderful question. I have some, in the book, I even showed some paintings from the history of art. If you've looked at the book, there's a kind of a belathke, and I have discussions of Francis Bacon's paintings. So I think there's a deep connection between these discussions and philosophy of art. And again, this is an aspect of the book that I think is quite novel and original and sort of trying to break new ground.
So I'm not the only person who's made this claim, but there's just a few of us making this claim and articulating it, and I have a way of articulating this claim in the book. So yes, I I think there are very similar issues coming up in the philosophy of art and the way which we study art, which again invites us to think from the bottom up, starting up with the practice of artists and artisans.
and then building up philosophical theory that respects that practice. So for instance, one of the outcomes of this comparison between art and science that I discuss in the book is that mirror accounts, mirroring accounts of representation are no good for either scientific or artistic representation. A piece of art doesn't represent its target situation just by trying or attempting to be a perfect copy of
That would be misleading and not very interesting way of approaching art, even representational, clearly representational art. Often a piece of art describes its target by mischaracterizing it, caricaturizing it, simplifying in different ways, and abstracting certain features from the situation of particular interest. And so it focuses on particular...
features of interest in the target systems, as opposed to just attempting to be a perfect copy in every single detail of the situation that it describes. Even very realistic art, when you think about it, is not really an attempt to a mirror perfect copy of the target situation, but will introduce distortions in different ways that will make it more realistic.
Mauricio Suárez (49:36.204)
So I think they're really wonderful parallels and just as we cannot understand art as merely copying nature, but it's much more a way of inquiring intelligently into what nature provides us with and the sort of resources that it provides us with. Similarly for scientific models, you kind of think of them as just merely replicating or copying.
nature to the last ultimate detail, but you have to think of models as intelligent tools for intelligent inquiry into the nature of the target systems that they aim to describe. So there are wonderful parallels between scientific and artistic practice, their relation to philosophical theory, and I explore them in the book. And I have a long disquisition of what the main features of representation art are and why they are
perfectly analogous to many of features of scientific models and theories. Yes.
PJ (50:37.41)
Well, Dr. Suarez, again, I want to be respectful of time. I also encourage our audience to read the book. I really appreciate your work here. tell you it was a joy to have you on today. Thank you.
Mauricio Suárez (50:48.96)
Yeah, thank you so much. That was really a lot of fun and I really enjoyed myself. Yeah, thank you so much.