Questions about idealizations in science are often framed along the lines of, How can science be so effective when it gets so much wrong? Rice’s book, Leveraging Distortions: Explanation, Idealization, and Universality in Science offers a refinement on this framing, where we need not commit to the premise that idealizations are, in fact, wrong, that they need to be contained to the irrelevant parts of a model, or should be explained away as mere appearance. Rice takes a holist approach in which idealization is more like a process by which models as a whole are leveraged into better fit with their targets. Idealizations should not be carved out one by one on this approach; they make sense in the context of the models in which they figure, and they distort in ways that illuminate features like universal behavior in the systems being modeled. This is a refreshing approach to how...
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