ABSTRACT
Models are felicitous falsehoods. They are false in that they idealize, distort, or omit aspects of their targets; felicitous in that, by so doing, they highlight features of the phenomena that are difficult to discern. This chapter extends Hughes’ DDI account to show how models embody and advance understanding. Models with targets denote their targets. The inferences they license exemplify features in an artificial setting, thereby affording epistemic access to them. Model users then impute those features to the target. The target is not held to literally instantiate the features imputed to it. Rather, the model is effective when it is as if the target instantiated those features, and the fact that it is as if the target instantiated those features contributes to the understanding of the target.
