Scientific models are distributed and never abstract: A naturalistic perspective

Abstract

In the current epistemological debate scientific models are not only considered as useful devices for explaining facts or discovering new entities, laws, and theories, but also rubricated under various new labels: from the classical ones, as abstract entities and idealizations, to the more recent, as fictions, surrogates, credible worlds, missing systems, make-believe, parables, functional, epistemic actions, revealing capacities. This article discusses these approaches showing some of their epistemological inadequacies, also taking advantage of recent results in cognitive science. I will substantiate my revision of epistemological fictionalism reframing the received idea of abstractness and ideality of models with the help of recent results related to the role of distributed cognition (common coding) and abductive cognition (manipulative).