Akademik

A model for a set of sentences is an interpretation under which they are all true.

(science) A representation of one system by another, usually more familiar, whose workings are supposed analogous to that of the first. Thus one might model the behaviour of sound waves upon that of waves in water, or the behaviour of a gas upon that of a volume containing moving billiard balls. Whilst nobody doubts that models have a useful heuristic role in science, there has been intense debate over whether a good explanation of some phenomenon needs a model, or whether an organized structure of laws from which it can be deduced suffices for scientific explanation. The debate was inaugurated by Duhem in his The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (1906), which attacked the ‘shallow’ pictorial imaginings of British physicists, contrasting them with the pure deductive structures of proper science.