Abstract

How do models represent reality? There are two conditions that scientific models must satisfy to be representations of real systems, the aboutness condition and the epistemic condition. In this article, I critically assess the two main fictionalist theories of models as representations, the indirect fiction view and the direct fiction view, with respect to these conditions. And I develop a novel proposal, what I call ‘the new fiction view of models’. On this view, models are akin to fictional stories; they represent real-world phenomena if they stand in a denotation relation with reality; and they enable knowledge of reality via the generation of theoretical hypotheses, model–world comparisons and direct attributions.