ABSTRACT
There are a plethora of philosophical issues involving the relationship between a theory and its models. What criteria distinguish a theory from its models? What is the relationship between a theory and its models? What is the role of idealization in the construction of models? When these questions are examined by philosophers in the scientific context of physics, they typically use examples drawn from Newtonian mechanics. Presumably, in classical physics, these questions receive their clearest answer. Quantum mechanics raises additional conceptual and interpretative complications. Quantum field theory (QFT), which is the successor to quantum mechanics, has its own conceptual and mathematical difficulties. Those problems might be one of the reasons that the topic of models in QFT has not received much attention in the philosophy literature (notable exceptions being Hartmann [[1998] and Krause and Bueno [2007]). Part of the problem is that there is no definitive formulation of QFT. Different formulations of QFT include Lagrangian QFT, Wightman’s axiomatic formulation of QFT, effective QFT, and algebraic QFT (AQFT).
