ABSTRACT
This is argued, for instance, by Nickles, who illustrates this with the example of chemistry.
[T]he model-building method of doing chemistry was and is also important in a formal sense (although not the usual logico-mathematical one) in that it induces a certain structural organization on the body of chemical knowledge, and provides a particularly concrete way to explore the space of possible chemical structures. Chemical knowledge imposes definite limits upon this space, hence, constraints onmodel building in general. Any specific structural problem imposes additional constraints, as does any hypothesized structural information; so model building is a way to represent the particular research problem with its full array of defining constraints.8
