Cryptography Reference
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previously lavished on other dimensions of the scientific process. These
investigations have raised models' epistemological profile to the point
where together with “measuring instruments, experiments, theories and
data,” they can today be acknowledged “as one of the essential ingredients
in the practice of science.” 57
Models resist easy categorization however: they form a highly hetero-
geneous class that includes, among others, physical objects (e.g., a wooden
scale model of a bridge, Watson and Crick's model of DNA), analog models
(e.g., modeling the mind in computational terms), idealized models (e.g.,
rational economic actors in markets), and mathematical models (e.g., equa-
tions that model economic processes or climate change). 58 In fact, they
often combine these elements in “gerrymandered ontologies” that freely
mix the pictorial, the narrative, and the mathematical. 59 Whatever form
they take, models endure as part of a discipline's worldview, enshrined and
transmitted through textbooks, core texts, and other apparatus of disciplin-
ary culture.
Models provide a crucial intermediary link between the abstraction of
theories and the concreteness of observable phenomena: “Models become
a form of glue, simultaneously epistemic and social, that allows inquiry to
go forward, by connecting the ideal and the material. To do that, they need
to make compromises: they must simultaneously look like theory—because
they have to explain and predict, and give structure—and like practical
knowledge—because they have to connect to real world features.” 60 This
connection with the real world is, in fact, the defining characteristic of
models: they “should behave in the same way as the things they represent
behave. Models are thus different from theories not only in being applied,
but in being analogues.” 61
These analogues function by eliminating the superfluous, focusing on
the significant dimensions of the modeled phenomena. The selection of
relevant dimensions is often described in terms of reaching for “essences,”
such as “the analysis of a mathematical model allows the essence of
a phenomenon to be penetrated.” 62 Giere suggests the more pragmatic
criteria of “fitness”:
Models need only be similar to particular real-world systems in specified respects
and to limited degrees of accuracy. The question for a model is how well it “fits”
various real-world systems one is trying to represent. One can admit that no model
fits the world perfectly in all respects while insisting that, for specified real-world
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