Book:
Leveraging Distortions: Explanation, Idealization, and Universality in Science (MIT Press, 2021)
A fundamental rule of logic is that in order for an argument to provide good reasons for its conclusion, the premises of the argument must be true. In this book, Collin Rice shows how the practice of science repeatedly, pervasively, and deliberately violates this principle. Rice argues that scientists strategically use distortions that misrepresent relevant features of natural phenomena in order to explain and understand—and that they use these distortions deliberately and justifiably in order to discover truths that would be otherwise inaccessible.
Countering the standard emphasis on causation, accurate representation, and decomposition of science into its accurate and inaccurate parts, Rice shows that science's epistemic achievements can still be factive despite their being produced through the use of holistically distorted scientific representations. Indeed, he argues, this distortion is one of the most widely employed and fruitful tools used in scientific theorizing. Marshalling a range of case studies, Rice contends that many explanations in science are noncausal, and he presents an alternate view of explanation that captures the variety of noncausal explanations found across the sciences. He proposes an alternative holistic distortion view of idealized models, connecting it to physicists' concept of a universality class; shows how universality classes can overcome some of the challenges of multiscale modeling; and offers accounts of explanation, idealization, modeling, and understanding.
Podcast interview (with Carrie Figdor) about the book: https://newbooksnetwork.com/leveraging-distortions
Publications:
Rice, C. and Khalifa, K. (2025). "Thank You for Misunderstanding!" Philosophical Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-025-02311-1.
Rice, C. (2024). "Beyond Reduction and Emergence: Tailoring Multiscale Modeling Techniques to Particular Contexts." Biology and Philosophy, 39(12): 1-35.
Rice, C. (forthcoming). “Which Possibilities Enable Scientific Understanding?” In Modeling the Possible, (ed. Tarja Knuuttila)
Rice, C. (forthcoming). “Idealization”, In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Scientific Modeling.Rice, C. (forthcoming). “The Epistemic Benefits of Diversity in Introductory Philosophy Classes” American Association of Philosophy Teachers (AAPT), Studies in Pedagogy.
Rice, C. (2022). "Modeling Multiscale Patterns: Active Matter, Minimal Models, and Explanatory Autonomy" Synthese 200(6): 1-35.
Rice, C. (2022). “Leveraging Distortions: Explanation, Idealization and Universality in Science by Collin Rice: Replies by the Author” (includes replies to commentary from Jay Odenbaugh, Jennifer Jhun, Catherine Elgin, and Christopher Pincock) Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 95: 233-235.**Rice, C. (2022). “Scientific Representations and Understanding: A Communal and Dynamical View”, In Lawler, I., Khalifa, K, and Shech, E. Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences. London: Routledge.
Rice, C. (2021). "Understanding Realism" Synthese, 198: 4097-4121.
Rice, C. (2020). "Universality and Modeling Limiting Behaviors", Philosophy of Science, 87: 839-840,
Rice, C., Rohwer, Y. and Ariew, A. (2019). "Explanatory Schema and the Process of Model Building", Synthese, 196, 4735-4757.