The problem of the representation of nature: natural entities within models of experimentation

Abstract

Laboratory experimentation systems involve standardized natural entities alluding to their high transformation in successive purification and selection processes (Kohler (1994). Karin Knoor Cetina (1999) refers to singular homogeneous entities, coming to constitute in some different of those natural entities.  Márquez describes this as a process of abstraction. She claims that to choose characteristics reduces the complexity and thus, idealized representations that correspond to selected and abstracted characters of the individual as such. They are standardized forms of living entities that have an inferential function: from the data obtained in the standardized individual under laboratory conditions to the organisms that are “outside the laboratory”, deriving data that appear in the inferences. Concerning the experimentation and representation of nature, Hans-Jorg Rheinberger (1997) considers that one model succeeds another, in a chain that never refers to a natural reality as such. This article exposes the problem that exists in the representation of nature that science claims. It concludes that the inferences derived from the theories about reality would be restricted by a representation model that is part of another model within the laboratory. In this sense, they would not account for a natural reality as a reference.