Poetic Understanding and Scientific Knowledge: Models as Aesthetic Descriptions

Modeling is an important scientific method of representing and understanding real world phenomena. Models provide idealized representations of their target systems in the sense that their description of those targets is intentionally inaccurate. However, given that science strives for correct knowledge about the world, the idealized nature of models raises an epistemological conundrum: How can one learn something true about real-world phenomena by studying models of them that are knowingly false? A modeling stance in science seems either epistemologically deficient or contrary to the realist aim of science. In this paper, Wittgenstein’s method of aesthetic description is proposed as an alternative approach to scientific modeling that steers clear of the dilemma between epistemic futility and antirealism. Aesthetic descriptions explain perplexing phenomena by analogy with familiar objects or events, thus evoking a poetic understanding of these phenomena that defies conventional articulation and ultimately consists in a direct acquaintance with the phenomena themselves. From this, an aesthetic view of models is developed that can both sustain a realist stance toward science and explain why models are epistemically valuable. It also implies, however, a peculiar kind of scientific knowledge: one which is partly implicit and in a certain sense ineffable.