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Tim,
I'm somewhat puzzled... how did we get from "scientifically proving the existence of" something unperceivable to what you have below: Tim Gwinn wrote: Going back to the original thread, if we take the hypothesis that there is an unperceivable primary structure and unperceivable conformation which is causally responsible for phenomena, and we build a formal representation of that primary structure and conformation, then I think that we have created a metaphor, not a model. Because they are both unperceivable, there is no way to do any encoding from the primary structure or conformation to the formal side of the modeling relation. Thus, we do not have a commuting modeling relation, and our formal representation is not a model, but a metaphor. How does that sound? Once you know something exists, you can study it further to try and
learn the hows and whys of it. Why would you need to model it from the start?
Clearly, if you don't know enough about a system to model it in any useful way,
you would have to keep working to learn more about it, right?
But I find it hard to believe that you won't accept the
notion that it is possible to prove, indirectly but scientifically, the
existence of something that is beyond our current abilities to perceive
directly. Am I misunderstanding your point of view?
Judith
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