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This chapter present ten general principles for improving the teaching of demography. Support for these principles is found in (a) the ideas of the semantic or model-based school of the philosophy of science, and (b) the design of courses and textbooks in the physical and biological sciences. Demography courses and texts based on these principles would present demography as a complete science, with abundant theoretical models as well as technique, data and descriptive findings.

In this chapter, the basic ideas from Chap. are applied to concrete examples of models relating to fertility, specifically the total fertility rate, a measurement model, and the Easterlin socio-economic model of fertility, a behavioral model.

This chapter repeats some of ideas from Chaps. and , but with slightly different emphasis and concrete examples. A key section compares the exponential model (formal demography) and the Easterlin fertility model (behavioral demography), arguing for the similarity of their epistemological status as abstract models. This chapter also contains a brief reprise of the model-based view of science contrasted with logical empiricism. It can serve as a brief summary of the earlier chapters.

The previous chapters advocate a new philosophical perspective on demography, the semantic or model-based view. This would replace logical empiricism, which sought theory through universal or near-universal generalizations – ‘empirical laws.’ In the model-based view, models, not laws, are the central element of science. And models are seen not as true or false, but simply as abstract representations of some portion of reality – judged worthwhile if they fit closely enough, in certain respects, to be useful for a specific scientific or practical aim.