ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights some parallels between art and science and also suggests that the difference between the arts and the sciences is more practical than epistemic. Like a scientific experiment, a work of fiction selects, isolates, and insulates, manipulating circumstances so that particular properties, patterns, and irregularities are exemplified. Fictions, thought experiments, and laboratory experiments exclude factors deemed irrelevant so that they can investigate the consequences of those that remain. Experiments, thought experiments, and fictions contrive artificial situations to exemplify features that otherwise are likely to be epistemically inaccessible or overlooked. Models, like some works of art, represent one thing or one sort of thing as another. Representation-as is a complex form of reference that involves both denotation and exemplification. According to a familiar stereotype, art is vague while science is precise. Science then strives for symbols that bear univocal interpretations, while art welcomes symbols that bear multiple interpretations.
