Organon F

Volume 30, May 2023, Issue 2, Pages 165–170

ISSN 2585-7150 (online) ISSN 1335-0668 (print)

Models are the coin of the realm in current philosophy of science, as they are in science itself, having replaced laws and theories as the primary strategy. Logical Positivism tried to erase the older neo-Kantian distinction between ideal constructions and reality. It returns in the case of models. Nowak’s concept of idealization provided an alternative account of this issue. It construed model application as concretizations of hypotheses which improve by accounting for exceptions. This appears to account for physical law. But it raises the problem of uniqueness: is the result unique, as physical law should be? Neo-Kantianism failed this test. Its solutions were circular justifications for claims of uniqueness. Nowak inherited the problem without resolving it.

Ideal-types; idealization; Leszek Nowak; models; neo-Kantianism; Poznań School of Methodology; underdetermination.

Author

Stephen Turner

Affiliation

University of South Florida

Address

Department of Philosophy, University of South Florida, 4202 E Fowler Ave, Tampa, FL 33620, United States

E-mail

turner@usf.edu 

Received

12 December 2021

Accepted

10 January 2022

Publishers

Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences

Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences

APA

Turner, S. (2023). Nowak, Models, and the Lessons of Neo-Kantianism. Organon F, 30(2), 165–170. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2023.30208

Chicago

Turner, Stephen. 2023. "Nowak, Models, and the Lessons of Neo-Kantianism." Organon F 30 (2): 165–170. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2023.30208

Harvard

Turner, S. (2023). Nowak, Models, and the Lessons of Neo-Kantianism. Organon F, 30(2), pp. 165–170. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2023.30208

© Stephen Turner

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