ABSTRACT
Margaret Morrison and Nancy Cartwright share many views about scientific models. Far from revealing a disagreement between them about the role and importance of interpretive and representative models, their analyses of the superconductivity case seem to be not only compatible but largely complementary. According to Morrison, Cartwright’s discussion of the BSC model of superconductivity case in ‘Models and the Limits of Theory’ does not do justice to the role that representative models played in the development of a model of superconductivity. Morrison highlights the continuities among successive representative models of superconductors and, in particular, the recurring assumption that in superconductors there is an energy gap between the ground state and the excited state. According to Morrison, this continuity shows that the development of a theory of superconductivity was driven by the representative models culminating in the BCS model, which by employing the concept of Cooper pairs, provides a concrete underpinning for the mathematical BCS theory.
