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A New Role for Mathematics in Empirical Sciences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Atoosa Kasirzadeh
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Abstract

Mathematics is often taken to play one of two roles in the empirical sciences: either it represents empirical phenomena or it explains these phenomena by imposing constraints on them. This article identifies a third and distinct role that has not been fully appreciated in the literature on applicability of mathematics and may be pervasive in scientific practice. I call this the “bridging” role of mathematics, according to which mathematics acts as a connecting scheme in our explanatory reasoning about why and how two different descriptions of an empirical phenomenon relate to each other. I discuss two bridging roles appearing in biological and physical explanations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 88 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 686 - 706
Copyright
Copyright 2021 by the Philosophy of Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

†

I am very grateful to James Robert Brown, Laura Franklin-Hall, Franz Huber, Nicolas Fillion, Neil Dewar, Mario Günther, and three anonymous reviewers for very helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article. I also thank audiences at the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science in Vancouver and the British Society for the Philosophy of Science in Durham for valuable discussions and suggestions.

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