LSE Philosophy PhD Student Lorenzo Sartori has been published his new paper ‘Models Organisms as Scientific Representations’ in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

About the paper: In this article, I argue that model organisms (MOs) function as representations of other organisms, in the same way in which scientific models function as representations of their targets. This offers a response to the question of how we justify inferences from MOs to other biological systems. Building on Ankeny and Leonelli’s account of MOs and drawing on the resources of Frigg and Nguyen’s DEKI account of scientific representation, I argue that MO-based inferences are justified if and only if they exemplify properties that are translated into the ones imputed to the target system by an appropriate mapping function. Then, I defend this account against the charges of Levy and Curie and of Weber who have proposed non-representational accounts of MOs.

Link to the paper.