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Summary - How Do We Think About Models
Posted by Tim Joy on 1/26/2010
It goes something like this.
"What is it you do?"
"Well, I build, um, models."
"Oh, like WWII airplanes or old cars?"
"No. Uh, no." One stumbles, searching for something the listener might know. "They're computer models."
"What? Like how to build a PC?"
"No." Another try. "We use system dynamics . . . I mean, special icons that show . . . well, it's like . . . sort of a series of mathematical equations that . . . "
Your friend looks at his watch, remembers he has to be somewhere.
We've all been there, exactly there. It's where Gene Belllinger was recently when he submitted his thoughtful note describing models as cathedrals. His care with this metaphor touched on something. We who work in the field can so readily speak to each other, but our work and its products remain esoteric to most other people. Gene's notion that models are like cathedrals tells us, perhaps, that we are trying to communicate something ineffable through something concrete, that the idea of "model" still does not resonate with the general population. And so we often use another metaphor to help.
Of course, this opens up its own rough course of conversation, as the listener parses the metaphor, aligning the new with something he or she already knows. Indeed, in the short conversation that Gene opened, others spoke of jazz music and neural networks and Gene also spoke of stage plays. If we were gather all the metaphors we've enlisted to describe system dynamics, wouldn't we have a long list? This tells us, I believe, that we dabble in the universal.
We are telling stories, in a new language. For a new understanding.
For teachers, our task is to develop new and more facile users of this language. True, absolutely, what Sharon Villines notes: it's vital that "the model can be presented to students so they understand the process." Further, she states that while students might not savvy all the data and all the relationships, the mode of telling is critical. We tell a story, show a picture, animate a graph, unfurl a two- stock model? Ultimately, the purpose is to bring someone unfamiliar with mathematical or scientific concepts into a discussion so the "student will be more likely to understand the idea of a model as well as the idea of a system." She's right, of course. When students reel a bit when they hear the word "model" or "system," then we are in a tough spot. We need only recall the recent media play of the systems map detailing the Iragi conflict to know that while system dynamics may now be at the grown up table, we're still off to the side, down by the peas.
Sharon touches on something critical, though, a kind of rhetoric for models. In the classical notion of rhetoric, one must consider the audience, the purpose, and the mode (or genre). With a system dynamics model, the teacher/presenter surely must consider the same things; how one answers to each rhetorical domain results in a wholly different product. But this we also know is true for good teaching.
Toward the end of the discussion, Della Robertson noted that various disciplines see models in different ways, and - with a deep bow to Barry Richmond - reminded us that "all models are false." A model is never the thing, the map is not the territory (Korzybski?), but they have some truth. That's why we use them, why we need them. While the term "model" may be common in the sciences, is not at all common in the social sciences (at least at the high school level), much less so in literature. In literature, English teachers might speak of "archetypes," using the term as Joseph Campbell used it, a story or story element that captures something true about human nature. So, Darwin's model codifies biology in the way that Odysseus's archetypal journey speaks to the power of home.
A last note . . . Kathy Arizmendi recalled that the cathedral, like a model, is "unfinished," a hint of something more there. Indeed, the sacred ideal of a cathedral was that its nave and clerestory cause one to lift one's eyes and heart to God, not that God was in there or was the building itself. So also for the models we construct: they are a means to understanding. They help one see.
Thanks, All, for the discussion. It's a classic.
Tim
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