Processes and products: nature and epistemic contribution of idealizations in science

Resumo

What are scientific idealizations, what is their epistemic contribution to science, and how is it obtained? Along this paper, I introduce three different philosophical analysis of scientific idealization that have been offered as possible answers to the questions presented above. The differences between them consist in the way they understand the role of idealization in the construction of scientific models and the epistemic contribution that they ascribe to scientific models. Nonetheless, a restriction lies to their arguments: although they conceive idealizations in terms of processes, they tend to attribute their epistemic contribution to its products. In the last section of the paper, I argue that in order to recognize the process-based epistemic contribution of idealizations, it is required to seriously take into account the analysis of the scientific practices. That said, from a pluralistic point of view I suggest to regard idealizations as situated in scientific practices, this view may prove useful for their philosophical analysis