Van Fraassen argues that data provide the target-end structures required by structuralist accounts of scientific representation. But models represent phenomena not data. Van Fraassen agrees but argues that there is no pragmatic difference between taking a scientific model to accurately represent a physical system and accurately represent data extracted from it. In this article I reconstruct his argument and show that it turns on the false premise that the pragmatic content of acts of representation include doxastic commitments.

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ARTICLE CITATION

James Nguyen, "On the Pragmatic Equivalence between Representing Data and Phenomena," Philosophy of Science 83, no. 2 (April 2016): 171-191.

DOI: 10.1086/684959

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