Representing with Physical Models

Every student of scientific practices knows that physical models have long been used to represent a great many things. ² By and large, however, philosophers of science have taken for granted the representational powers of physical models. They have focused on more ubiquitous and seemingly more important theoretical models, particularly those found in mathematical physics. In this paper, I focus on physical models, comparing them first with theoretical models and finally with recently popular computational models. My aim is to show that the representational aspects of models used in science are fundamentally the same across these three categories of models. ³