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Re: [Swarm-Modelling] foundation of ABMs
From: |
Darren Schreiber |
Subject: |
Re: [Swarm-Modelling] foundation of ABMs |
Date: |
Tue, 5 Apr 2005 20:36:36 -0400 |
On Apr 5, 2005, at 8:06 PM, Christopher J. Mackie wrote:
Darren; I have no quarrel with anything that promotes humility and
courage, but are relativism and objectivism the best two touchpoints
for your argument? I'm not clear about how they're the kind of
indirect motivation to improve empirical adequacy that I understand
you to claim them to be, or (pace Kant) that contemplating the noumena
is sufficient to keep you on course between Scylla and Charybdis. How
is it different from contemplating your navel, or the face of God?
As (at least) one alternative, what about my favorite philosophy of
science, van Fraasen's "constructive empiricism"? I see that as much
closer in spirit to the perspective you attribute to McKelvey than is
Kant--and you don't have to postulate unseeable, unknowable thingies
to get there. Start by acknowledging inescapable subjectivity, don't
pretend to rely on what you can't possibly know, and strive always for
higher levels of empirical adequacy: that sounds like 'humility and
courage', and it also sounds like 'model-centered science'.
I'm not sure that we disagree. I chose relativism and objectivism as
targets simply because they underlie a lot of popular thinking about
about how we know things.
"Contemplating the noumena" isn't something that I spend much time
doing. But, I do think that acknowledging that the world we observe is
not the same as the world as it is, is a useful habit. How many
undergraduate econ textbooks have I seen that begin with nuanced and
humble first chapter about the simplifying assumptions that they make
and end with a final chapter that has reduced the world to a couple of
utility functions and indifference curves? Even worse are the
occasional economists that I run into who actually believe that their
simplifying assumptions are "true", rather than useful tools for
achieving analytic results. Show me a "rational man" and I will have
to seriously change my career trajectory.
And I would be cautious about too much emphasis on "inescapable
subjectivity." In the extreme, this is my concern with relativism.
I don't have enough familiarity with van Fraasen's work to comment
constructively. In reaction to your comments though, empirical
adequacy is not my only motivator. One of my concerns with much
philosophy of science is the emphasis on the "true" to the exclusion of
the "beautiful" and "just." My days in law convinced me that the "just
the facts ma'am" approach to contemporary political science is missing
the boat.
Darren