ABSTRACT
Daniela Bailer-Jones’s paper forces us to confront the questions of what it means to say that a theory is true, what it means to say that a model is true, and what it means to say that a model provides a true representation. For my own part I have no real philosophic views about truth and indeed follow Arthur Fine in his claim that there is-and probably should be-no “theory” of truth. But I do think that scientific models sometimes provide claims about the world, that sometimes these claims are meant to be true or approximately true, that sometimes they might well be true, and that sometimes we have good evidence to suppose them to be true. Often even when models are intended literally, not everything in the model is meant to depict something in the world and certainly not everything in the world-perhaps not even everything relevant to the phenomenon under study-is meant to be depicted in the model.
