ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines a selection of this wide range of approaches to model appraisal. It describes models from each of these areas of science. Scientists do not limit the scope of modeling practice to just mathematical modeling. Molecular biologists’ modeling is diagram-based, and increasingly 3D visualization techniques are used in presenting molecular biology models. The book discusses the representational view of models and then examines and critically appraises some alternate accounts of the model representation relation. Philosophers of science first introduced models as a counter to what they considered an overly sentence-based understanding of science. Logical positivists and logical empiricists presented and defended a highly influential approach to science that characterized scientific theories as collections of sentences representing laws and observation sentences.
