"Modeling involves a style of scientific thinking in which the argument is structured by the model, but in which the application is achieved via a narrative prompted by an external fact, an imagined event or question to be answered." (Uskali Mäki, "Fact and Fiction in Economics: Models, Realism and Social Construction", 2002)
"As the frontiers of science are continually pushed back, and the distance between experimenter and the world widens, the intelligibility of the world demands the construction and manipulation of models. Scientific discourse is often used to convey the information from well-grounded models. Scientific thinking is inescapably modeling and intimately involved with inquiry. ls, is essential for revealing unobserved, but observable, events." (Daniel Rothbart [Ed.], "Modeling: Gateway to the Unknown", 2004)
"In sum, an enlightened understanding of both physical and social phenomena is possible through modeling, as various stages of inquiry. Just as real world models are inseparable from experiences of the empirical world, a narrative is thoroughly implicated in a social encounter. Actors resort to narratives as they respond to the movements of others and project possibilities for future encounters. An actor becomes a virtual witness to an idealized scene, drawing upon past encounters to construct a picture of future, hypothetical events."
"It is clear today that modern science developed when people stopped debating metaphysical questions about the world and instead concerned themselves with the discovery of laws that were primarily mathematical."
"Historically, science has pursued a premise that Nature can be understood fully, its future predicted precisely, and its behavior controlled at will. However, emerging knowledge indicates that the nature of Earth and biological systems transcends the limits of science, questioning the premise of knowing, prediction, and control. This knowledge has led to the recognition that, for civilized human survival, technological society has to adapt to the constraints of these systems." (Nari Narasimhan, "Limitations of Science and Adapting to Nature", Environmental Research Letters, 2007)
"Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in." (Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2013)
"Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other." (John M Greer, "After Progress: Reason and Religion at the End of the Industrial Age", 2015)
"Intellectual inquiry begins with myth, religion and philosophy. Originally, philosophy (or perhaps theology or metaphysics) is the queen of the sciences, other intellectual disciplines having only a highly subservient, specialized role to play within philosophy. [...] Instead of being the queen of the sciences, overarching all other sciences, philosophy has been transformed into a highly specialized, technical, somewhat meagre enterprise, concerned not with improving our knowledge and understanding of the world - for that is the business of the empirical sciences - but rather with clarifying concepts and solving conceptual problems." (Nicholas Maxwell, "Karl Popper, Science and Enlightenment", 2017)
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