Limits On Use
While idealization is used extensively by certain scientific disciplines, it has been traditionally rejected by others. For instance, Edmund Husserl recognized the importance of idealization but opposed its application to the study of the mind, holding that mental phenomena do not lend themselves to idealization.
Although idealization is considered one of the essential elements of modern science, it is nonetheless the source of continued controversy in the literature of the philosophy of science. For example, Nancy Cartwright suggested that Galilean idealization presupposes tendencies or capacities in nature and that this allows for extrapolation beyond what is the ideal case.
There is continued philosophical concern over how Galileo’s idealization method assists in the description of the behavior of individuals or objects in the real world. Since the laws created through idealization (such as the ideal gas law) describe only the behavior of ideal bodies, these laws can only be used to predict the behavior of real bodies when a considerable number of factors have been physically eliminated (e.g. through shielding conditions) or ignored. Laws that account for these factors are usually more complicated and in some cases have not yet been developed.
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