[FRIAM] models

Fri Dec 9 13:09:26 EST 2022

DaveW -
> The central question: is there a difference between a 'model' of something and a 'theory' of something?

After reading your full description of your question and Eric's own 
maunderings on (a tangent to?) the topic, I am both (over)full of 
thoughts and at a loss.

> To me: a model is a representation of a subset of what we know about something; a theory is the complete body of knowledge.

I am at a loss because there are so many domains in which this language 
can have similar but different meanings.  Your reference to Buddhist 
Cosmology and Mandalas being one, card-catalogs and libraries  another, 
and (esoteric) Science as exemplified by QM. Your domain of 
interest/expression seems to be a bit more in the realm of folksonomy 
(and beyond) elicitation/construction?  The goal of eliciting/creating a 
shared world-view (cosmology)?

I believe one of the more useful distinctions between model and theory 
is that "a theory is a model which is testable".   This would only seem 
to apply to formal models and theories of course.   To what extent such 
formalisms apply to everyday discourse or more loosely (less formal) 
attempts to describe the world is perhaps what you are asking about?

Colloquially (and without support of my last statement) I take Buddhist 
Cosmology to be (intended to be) a Theory... in fact a "Theory of 
Everything" and any given Mandala to be a *model*.

The question of whether a card-catalog is a "model" devolves (I think) 
to it being an "indexable model" or perhaps a model of the library (or 
an idealized library such as the LOC or even Borges "Library of 
Babel"?   In your assertion that a model is a subset of a theory, I 
think this is apt...   this implementation (physical cards in a physical 
drawer in a physical cabinet in a physical building) of a model (of 
indices into the titles, keywords and presumed contents of a body of 
written/visual material) of a collection of same, exists within a larger 
"theory" of how knowledge can be represented and organized.

> In my book-in-development I talk about how to create a shared theory by having people come together and tell stories about their domain. The telling of stories creates a shared theory of the domain (or some subset of it that is of immediate concern) that continues to exist—in the participant's heads. While the story telling proceeds two graphics are generated: one with the stories themselves (as 'index cards') and relations among stories, e.g., story a extends story b, story c provides an alternative case for a, x is a revision of a, etc.; and two, a Gestalt Map that shows objects as bubbles and connecting lines as relations among those objects.

I don't know that your project as described here aspires to come up with 
a formal theory or set of models related to that theory so much as to 
build a working methodology for building a shared 
understanding/appreciation/agreement among groups of people through 
structured storytelling?   Maybe it is implied that someone with a more 
scholarly bent/aspiration would either provide a more formal backdrop 
for this project to register on, but that is not the primary goal?

Two references come to mind for me here... the first is pretty 
tangential but relevant because it has been referenced on-list before 
and has a haunting resonance for me to what I heard when I first read 
your description, and that is Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game> which Stephen has 
brought up a few times.

The other is my recent discovery of Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk 
<https://birchbarkbooks.com/products/sand-talk> where most relevantly to 
this discussion he uses the term "Yarning" to describe something 
parallel to what I think you are describing (the iterative 
collecting/sharing/correlating of stories in a domain).

In Mathematical Logic (circling back to the more formal) there are 
specific meanings ascribed to both model and theory that might be useful 
for background.  From the Wikipedia page on Model Theory 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_theory>:

    Inmathematical logic
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_logic>,*model theory*is
    the study of the relationship betweenformal theories
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_(mathematical_logic)>(a
    collection ofsentences
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_(mathematical_logic)>in
    aformal language
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_language>expressing statements
    about amathematical structure
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_(mathematical_logic)>), and
    their models (those structures in which the statements of the theory
    hold).^[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_theory#cite_note-1>

We haven't beaten the dead horse of metaphor here entirely yet, but I 
will refer to Glen's most recent informal concession? that a metaphor is 
(just?) a map or maybe more to the point it provides a map from one 
domain to another.  Technically I believe that is what a model does as 
well, though a mathematical model maps into the domain of mathematical 
language/structures while generally metaphors ground out into a domain 
of human experience which may or may not have subsequent iterative 
mappings into formal mathematics.   The "beating of a dead horse", for 
example, references a complex set of notions about the very human 
experience of "owning" another living being, expecting to elicit work 
from it through physical punishment, etc. which can (and surely has 
been) be abstracted into a more formal definition of ownership, 
coercion, useful work, etc. but whose utility depends more on the 
receiver's ability to imagine being the beater of a *literal* draft 
animal whose death is a direct or indirect result of previous and 
continued beatings.

I'll go check with Magister Ludi, Tyson Yunkaporta, Luis Borges and the 
Venerable Losang Samtang for more perspective and if you are lucky, keep 
the results to myself.

- Steve

>
> Those on the other side of the debate contend that these are models, just like the models they typically use in software development..
>
> I say they are not, they are merely a form of 'external memory' a collection of evocative triggers whose sole purpose is to prompt a 'recall to mind' of the actual stories that were told involving those objects or those relations. The Gestalt Map, in my mind, represents nothing and could not—as is assumed about all other models—convey information to anyone who had not participated in the story telling session.
>
> Specific questions:
> 1- Is the Wheel of Life mandala, (attached) a model of Tibetan Buddhist Cosmology? Or, does it merely serve the purpose of recalling to mind  the stories that a Tibetan would have heard about the world and how it works.
> 2- Is a card catalog (forgive me, I am old) a model of a library, or even of its collection?
> 3- Are the Dewey Decimal or the Library of Congress numbering systems, models of human knowledge?
> 4- Is it correct to say that Quantum Physics has a superlative model, but no theory? (The dictum to, "to shut up and compute" seems to support an affirmative answer to this question.
> 5- is a metaphor a model?
>
> For a short time, Model Driven Development garnered attention in software development: The idea was you could build a complete, accurate, and unambiguous model of a domain, then use a series of formal transforms (ala mathematics) to generate executable code. No one, outside of academia, believes this much anymore, but, in less drastic form, dominates all of software development and has nearly from the beginning, e.g., CASE and Rationale's 'round-trip-engineering'.
>
> I am writing about what might be called Theory-Driven Development and it is important that I be able to explain the difference between theory and model.
>
> Thanks for any thoughts any of you might have.
>
> davew
>
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