Twilight of the Perfect Model Model

WEDNESDAY APRIL 6
"Twilight of the Perfect Model Model”
Public Lecture Series
Professor Paul Teller
6:30 - 8.00 pm, Theatre A, Elizabeth Murdoch Building, Melbourne University

Abstract: Historically science has often been thought to give us exactly true, universal laws.  The lecture will sketch a history of these ideas and then explain how we now think about science as being in the business of fashioning inexact representations, or “models”. The picture of science as producing exact representations was itself a model, a model of science as chasing after the “perfect model”, a model we are now ready to retire in favor of a more accurate understanding of the kind of knowledge that science provides.