Mathematics and Scientific Representation

Christopher Pincock received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002. After eight years at Purdue University, he recently joined the philosophy department at the University of Missouri as an Associate Professor.

• 1 Introduction ; 1.1 A Problem ; 1.2 Classifying Contributions ; 1.3 An Epistemic Solution ; 1.4 Explanatory Contributions ; 1.5 Other Approaches ; 1.6 Interpretative Flexibility ; 1.7 Key Claims ; I Epistemic Contributions ; 2 Content and Confirmation ; 2.1 Concepts ; 2.2 Basic Contents ; 2.3 Enriched Contents ; 2.4 Schematic and Genuine Contents ; 2.5 Inference ; 2.6 Core Conceptions ; 2.7 Intrinsic and Extrinsic ; 2.8 Confirmation Theory ; 2.9 Prior Probabilities ; 3 Causes ; 3.1 Accounts of Causation ; 3.2 A Causal Representation ; 3.3 Some Acausal Representations ; 3.4 The Value of Acausal Representations ; 3.5 Batterman and Wilson ; 4 Varying Interpretations ; 4.1 Abstraction as Variation ; 4.2 Irrotational Fluids and Electrostatics ; 4.3 Shock Waves ; 4.4 The Value of Varying Interpretations ; 4.5 Varying Interpretations and Discovery ; 4.6 The Toolkit of Applied Mathematics ; 5 Scale Matters ; 5.1 Scale and ScientificRepresentation ; 5.2 Scale Separation ; 5.3 Scale Similarity ; 5.4 Scale and Idealization ; 5.5 Perturbation Theory ; 5.6

a rare and fairly comprehensive philosophical account of the success of mathematics in science and after reading it you may be left with the impression that something like this should have been published years ago. This book is a major contribution to an otherwise underdeveloped area in the philosophy of science and is most likely to be well referenced ... this book is at the cutting-edge.