Making sense of why something succeeded or failed is central to scientific practice: it provides an interpretation of what happened, i.e. an hypothesized explanation for the results, that informs scientists’ deliberations over their next steps. In philosophy, the realism debate has dominated the project of making sense of scientists’ success and failure claims, restricting its focus to whether truth or reliability best explain science’s most secure successes. Our aim, in contrast, will be to expand and advance the practice-oriented project sketched by Arthur Fine in his work on the Natural Ontological Attitude. An important obstacle to articulating a positive program, we suggest, has been overlooking how scientists adopt standardized rules and procedures in order to define and operationalize meanings for success and failure relative to their situated goals. To help fill this gap, we introduce two new ideas, design specifications and track records, and show how they advance our ability to make sense of scientific modeling practices while maintaining a deflationary stance toward the realism debate.

了解为什么成功或失败对科学实践至关重要：它提供了对发生的情况的解释，即对结果的假设解释，为科学家进行下一步研究提供了信息。在哲学上，现实主义辩论主导了使科学家理解成功和失败主张的项目，将其焦点集中在真理或可靠性是否能最好地解释科学最可靠的成功上。相反，我们的目标是扩大和推进Arthur Fine在其关于自然本体论态度的工作中所勾画的以实践为导向的项目。我们建议，制定积极计划的一个重要障碍是，一直在忽略科学家如何采用标准化的规则和程序来定义和实施相对于其既定目标的成功和失败的含义。为了填补这一空白，我们引入了两个新的想法，设计规范和跟踪记录，并展示了它们如何提高我们理解科学建模实践的能力，同时保持对现实主义辩论的紧缩立场。