How to Do Science with Models

The book finds its strength in Gelfert s functional approach, which enables the author to bring cohesion to the vast sea of resources in the philosophy of modelling, and makes the text s relevance for historians and scientists clear. Gelfert s focus on the various uses of models and on case studies from the history of science create a work from which the philosopher, the historian and the scientist can learn. (Lydia Braunack-Mayer, Annals of Science, Vol. 74 (3), April, 2017)

It is much more than a philosophical primer, presenting an original contribution to our understanding of scientific modelling. It is an innovative examination of several topics that merit further work from philosophers of science interested in scientific representation and modelling. For such work, Gelfert has provided fruitful conceptual tools and theoretical analyses. (Tarja Knuuttila, BJPS Review of Books, bjpsbooks. wordpress. com, 2017)

Axel Gelfert s recent book How to do Sciencewith Models: A Philosophical Primer constitutes a short but important contribution to a growing literature devoted to exploring a number of philosophical issues raised by the ubiquity of models in the sciences, the great variety of existing models and modeling practices, as well as their indispensability to the scientific enterprise. the book is an outstanding and original piece of scholarship. (Sergio A. Gallegos, Metascience, Vol. 26, 2017)

Gelfert has produced a concise, clear, and readable book that is both a review of the state of the art and a personal reflection on the significance of modelling in science. The functional approach to modelling adopted by Gelfert seems to be the most fruitful one in the present state of the philosophical research on the topic. (Alejandro Cassini, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 31 (1), 2017)