Re: [Swarm-Modelling] foundation of ABMs

[Darren Schreiber]

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