This project develops at the intersection between philosophy of science, aesthetics and philosophy of mind and language. Modern science crucially relies on scientific models. Scientists construct, develop, manipulate and test models in order to learn about the real world phenomena they stand for. What are models? How do we learn with them? How do they represent? The key hypotheses are that models are akin to the fictions of literature and the arts, that learning with models is learning through the imagination, and that the representation relation between models and the world is a kind of indirect denotation that involves a necessary detour in the imagination.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 654034. The project runs October 2015 – October 2017.