Talk:Idealization (philosophy of science)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 16 January 2019 and 24 April 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Hopewell Pinstripe. Peer reviewers: Alshalash1.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 00:15, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Editing the section on the social sciences
Hi, everyone,

I've written a short account of debates regarding idealization in the social sciences for this article -- it seemed to me that what is said in this article on this topic isn't sufficient. I look forward to comments/edits! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hopewell Pinstripe (talk • contribs) 17:07, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

the initial paragraph is off - but I am at a loss to repair it without losing something.

Idealization the only way?
You have "...idealization fits nicely into the analysis utilized by certain scientific disciplines..."

Fits nicely? Compared with what? Is there an alternative to idealization?

Husserl may have declined to do it and except for economics it is not generally done in the social sciences. But Husserl and the social sciences are pretty much failures as science. Except for economics. Is not the relative success of economics owing crucially to the adoption of ideal-types and working out, deductively, the ideal relationships between them?

Isn't idealization the ONLY way to do science theory?

120.156.96.72 (talk) 11:04, 19 June 2010 (UTC) Pepper

Problem with description of Galileo's idealization
In the "early use" section, the article strongly implies that the reason a ball comes to a stop in real life when rolled along a surface is primarily air resistance, but this seems quite wrong -- isn't the friction with the surface it's rolling on much more significant? Scorchgeek (talk) 02:58, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

Idealization (cognitive heuristic)
For my own research purposes, I created a distinct page titled idealization (cognitive heuristic) which is more suitable as a direct target of The Philosophy of 'As if' by Hans Vaihinger. Vaihinger (and others who followed) are after something much broader than the concept as applied to the philosophy of science.

I'm leaving this remark here so that others will realize that things as they stand are not always a perfect conceptual fit. I found my own solution for my own wiki. I'm not sure it's the right solution on Wikipedia, or whether in fact there's any solution. On Wikipedia, it runs against the grain to create a missing page, no matter how conceptually useful, if it doesn't align with available sources. Not a problem for my own wiki: lacunae is the available sources can bite me. &mdash; MaxEnt 06:03, 2 May 2023 (UTC)


 * In particular, a book I was considering when I wrote "others who followed" was As If: Idealization and Ideals (2017) by Kwame Anthony Appiah. &mdash; MaxEnt 06:11, 2 May 2023 (UTC)