Catherine Z. Elgin
Papers on Exemplification

• Selective Disregard (Abstraction in Art and Science ed. Julia Sanchez-Dorado and Chiara Ambrosio. London: Routledge, 2024.)
  Abstract: The world is bewilderingly complicated. To understand anything, we need to overlook a lot and somehow organize the rest. What is most salient in everyday life is not always what is epistemically or practically important. Abstraction is a vehicle for distancing from detail. Through abstraction, science and art omit irrelevancies, streamline rough contours, judiciously simplify complexities. Using examples drawn from the sciences and the arts, I will argue that they do so by exemplifying significant. Often occluded features and demonstrating their significance. Distortion, I will show, is a form of abstraction in which non-standard features are exemplified. A fruitful abstraction is one in which omissions, distortions and simplifications provide resources for inferences that deepen our insight and extend our epistemic range.
  
  
• Exemplification: A Case Study (QUANDO HÁ ARTE! Ensaios de homenagem a Maria do Carmo d'Orey ed. Suzana Ramos. Silveira: Letras Errantes, Lda., 2023, 217-233.)
  Abstract: Through a discussion of an installation called Hemlock Hospice, I show how a stand of dying trees in the Harvard Forest was brought to function as a powerful, indeed potentially transformative work of art. Such transmutations of function are epistemically valuable. They augment the insights science yields. To treat a mundane object as art is to open our eyes to aspects of it and relations in which it stands to other things - aspects and relations that we would otherwise miss. I argue that the installation functions simultaneously as a scientific symbol and as an aesthetic one. Rather than being antithetical, the two functions are complementary.
  
  
• Making Manifest: The Role of Exemplification in the Sciences and the Arts (Principia, 15 (2011), 399-413)
  Abstract: Exemplification is the relation of an example to whatever it is an example of. Goodman maintains that exemplification is a symptom of the aesthetic: although not a necessary condition, it is an indicator that symbol is functioning aesthetically. I argue that exemplification is as important in science as it is in art. It is the vehicle by which experiments make aspects of nature manifest. I suggest that the difference between exemplars in the arts and the sciences lies in the way they exemplify. Density and repleteness (among the other symptoms of the aesthetic) are characteristic of aesthetic exemplars but not of scientific ones.
  
  
• Exemplification and the Dance (Philosophie de la Dance ed. Roger Pouivet. Rennes: Presses Universitaire de Rennes, 2010.)
  Abstract: I argue that dance embodies and conveys understanding. To understand a work of dance, spectators must understand the genre's or choreographer's idiom; they must know how to read the dance. In order for the dance to convey understanding of something beyond itself, spectators must have reason to accept or believe what the dance conveys. I argue that dances exemplify literal and metaphorical features that they share with other aspects of reality. They thereby make those features salient and afford epistemic access to them. I contrast classical ballet, modern dance, and postmodern dance to show how, and to what end, dances exemplify. Among the features exemplified, and sometimes problematized, are philosophical features, like the relation between mind and body, and political features like autonomy, democracy, interdependence, and elitism. In exemplifying such properties, a dance draws attention to them and stresses their significance. It thus equips us to recognize them when we see them again and intimates that we would do well to attend to them. In some cases, we remain bewildered. We have no idea why these people are doing those things, why anyone would consider what is going on art. Then we can make no sense of the work. Then our advance in understanding is Socratic. Knowing that you do not know is the first step to knowledge. The critical point is that an encounter with dance can not only change the way we see the world; it can improve the way we see the world.
  
  
• Telling Instances (Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science, ed. Roman Frigg and Matthew Hunter, Dordrecht: Springer, 2010, 1-17; Enrahonar, 49, 2012, 68-89 (in Spanish, translated by Remei Capdevila).)
  Abstract: Science is held to be the mirror of nature, while art imitates life. If so, representations in both disciplines should resemble their objects. Against such mimetic theories, I argue that exemplification rather than mere resemblance is crucial. I explicate exemplification - a referential relation of an exemplar to some of its features. Because exemplification is selective, an exemplar can diverge from its referent respects that are unexemplified. This is why an idealization, which is strictly false, can yield insight into the phenomena it concerns. Drawing on analogies with pictorial representations, I show how a model exemplifies features it shares with its target, highlights the significance of those features, and thereby yields an understanding of the target system.
  
  
• Exemplification, Idealization, and Understanding (Fictions in Science: Essays on Idealization and Modeling, ed. Mauricio Suárez, London: Routledge, 2009, 77-90.
  Abstract: Thesis: Idealized scientific representations are fictions that afford an understanding of the phenomena they concern by exemplifying features they share with those phenomena. I begin by explaining what exemplification is and what epistemological role it plays. I then explain how a fiction can exemplify something that obtains (but may be hard to recognize) in fact. Finally, I argue that construing scientific idealizations as fictions that exemplify features they share with the facts makes sense of the way they figure in understanding.