Tim & Boris, TG: "Boris nicely summarized "simulation" in his recent post: "let us understand that, through simulation, inferential entailments, which play the role of efficient causes, become material causes. And that makes a clear distinction between simulation and the modeling relation, because the modeling relation "respects" inferential structures"." Yes, this makes a lot of sense to me - an excellent distinction if applied deeply, I think. It also agrees with Tim's comment that simulations are mechanistic. However, it still does not provide a way to distinguish when one would call any given surrogate system an instance of a model or an instance of a simulation. It speaks more to the process of generating these surrogacies, the modeling relation being richly complex and on-going, whereas a simulation is intended as an approximation without further efforts to improve its congruency. The point I was makeing is that in the lab, we see only the snapshot of the modeling process, hence a single instance of a model, and that is what I was questioning if we could objectively distinguish it from a simulation. The fact that the model taken as part of a modeling relation is thus part of an ongoing process of commutation, whereas a simulation is not generally considered to be (although we do try to improve simulations ???), is perhaps as good an answer as I can get. Some fine points: The requirement of "commutation" is also not so clear to me, as anything that resembles nature at all can be said to commute with some aspect of it. The criteria of reflecting "real" entailment structures seems unapproachable because we never know if we built a model or simulation on similar principles as the natural system or not. That is a matter for experimentation. I would thus find it hard to distinquish simulacra from model in a practical sense - it would have to be a judgement of how "real" we think the model is based. For example, we would have called Ptolemy's model of the solar system a model as long as we believed nature was based on perfect circles. When our belief about that changed, it became a classic example of a simulacra (of which any finite instance would then be a simulation). The important point I come away with is that the modeling relation "respects inferential structures" as real in their own right, and implicit in any natural system such that they are then capable of disrupting any precise specification of that system.Thanks!!<> JK |