[gammadens]

There's an entire literature on very closely related concepts and issues -- many of the same issues arguably -- in the psychological test and measurement literature. There it's discussed tn terms of internal and external validity but interpretation is at its core and the scenario (and often models, at some level) are very similar. There you are trying to discriminate between psychologically relevant states, or outcomes, or variables, based on inputs in the form of responses to items (inputs). Focus is on articulating how to interpret test items an model structural features vis a vis inputs and outputs.

The literature on this is too hard to summarize in a post, but basically in turns into an empirical-scientific question, of making predictions about model features and testing these predictions scientifically.