Michael Weisberg, “Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World” (Oxford UP, 2013)
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What motivated Michael Weisberg to study models and how did his scientific background shape his philosophy?
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Hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel in the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talis, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt. We interview philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas including ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, social and political philosophy, and many others. Today's interview is with Michael Weisberg, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. His new book Simulation and Similarity Using Models to Understand the World is just out from Oxford University Press. In nineteen fifty six and nineteen fifty seven, the US Army Corps of Engineers decided to test a plan to dam up the San Francisco Bay in order to protect its water supply.
They built a one and a half acre model of the Bay Area in a warehouse with hydraulic pumps to simulate tides and river flows, and they observed the result. Their model showed what a disaster the dam plan would be. It would have turned the bay into a polluted wasteland. In his new book, Weisberg examines the nature, development, and widespread use of models in the sciences as a means to help explain and predict natural phenomena. Weisberg looks at concrete models such as the Bay Area model, computational models, and mathematical art models to argue for what is effectively a model of models, in which models are interpreted structures and their relation to the part of the world they model is understood in terms of weighted feature mapping.
His book systematizes and advances philosophical thinking about models and their central role in the practice of science. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Michael Weisberg.
Good morning. Nice to talk to you.
Hi, welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Glad to have you here.
Really a pleasure to be with you today.
Um, so we're g gonna be talking about your your new book, Simulation and Similarity, um, where you provide a foundation for, you know, of discussion of the kinds of models and the roles of models and in science and how they relate to to reality. So one of the things that uh that I like to start with is just um background in terms of you know yourself as as a philosopher, how you how you came to philosophy, um, and how you came to the areas of philosophy that you work in and in particular to the writing uh of this book.
So I suspect I'm pretty typical in coming to philosophy through the back door, maybe the side door. I was a originally working uh and very gung ho and seriously in science and chemistry in particular. And actually as an undergraduate I took a a philosophy of science course mostly to fulfill a requirement, but also because it seemed interesting.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What motivated Michael Weisberg to study models and how did his scientific background shape his philosophy?
0:00–11:31
2
How does Weisberg classify the three main kinds of scientific models – concrete, computational, and mathematical?
11:31–21:49
3
Why does Weisberg argue that a model’s physical construction distinguishes concrete models from the others?
21:49–32:46
4
What is the role of interpretation in Weisberg’s “model‑as‑interpreted‑structure” framework?
32:46–43:34
5
How does Weisberg differentiate between a model and its description, and why does that matter?
43:34–54:25
6
What does Weisberg mean by idealization, and how does it differ from abstraction or distortion?
54:25–1:05:37
7
Can scientific models provide explanations, and how does Weisberg relate modeling to mechanistic and robust explanations?
1:05:37–1:16:39
8
What is robustness analysis, and how does Weisberg see it guiding future work on model validation?
1:16:39–1:26:28
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