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The “Structure” of the “Strategy”: Looking at the Matthewson-Weisberg Trade-off and Its Justificatory Role for the Multiple-Models Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Michael Goldsby
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Abstract

The multiple-models approach, which has its origins in Levins’s work, is gaining broader acceptance among philosophers. Levins asserted that there is a trade-off between modeling desiderata, which justified the multiple-models approach through two separate justificatory paths. Some attention has been paid to the trade-off thesis, culminating in a paper by Matthewson and Weisberg. However, no attention has been paid to how the trade-off is supposed to justify the multiple-models approach. I argue that a trade-off between generality and precision cannot support one of Levins’s justificatory paths, and I consider what that might mean for the multiple-models approach.

Type
General Philosophy of Science
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 80 , Issue 5 , December 2013 , pp. 862 - 873
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I thank Elliott Sober, Malcolm Forster, Dan Hausman, Jay Odenbaugh, James Justus, John Basl, Matthew Kopec, Hayley Clatterbuck, Roberta Millstein, John Matthewson, Trevor Pearce, Roman Frigg, and Michael Weisberg for their helpful comments and advice.

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