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by gavagai691
758 days ago
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You don't think that a model is something abstract? Abstract doesn't have to imply nonphysical in the sense that people think souls or God are nonphysical. I mean abstract in the sense that language, mathematics, or a sketch are abstract. To expand on this: I think models are representations, and whether or not something is a model depends in some way on human minds. (In particular, it depends on whether a something would be understood by a human mind to be a representation.) I don't think that any correlation between physical systems qualifies one as a model for the other. Your definition as written would include any two things that are connected causally, or have a common cause, as models for one another. One problem (though not the only one) that I have is that your definition removes any mention of human minds. In particular, I think "representation" is, broadly speaking, some kind of correspondence relationship between linguistic or pictorial things (where I include mathematics as "linguistic") and physical reality, and "a representation" is some linguistic or pictorial thing that corresponds to reality. I think that a model is a kind of representation. A model is a kind of representation where for convenience and tractability, certain aspects of reality are left out or "abstracted away" (deliberately), with the goal of understanding the real world by understanding the simpler representation of the real world. |
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Models definitely don't have to be abstract. For example, researchers will talk about studying a disease or the effectiveness of a treatment in a "mouse model"[1].
That model is an actual concrete mouse that is being used as a model of a human. It's not abstract in the sense of language, mathematics, or a sketch, and they do the research by looking for the physical effects on the mouse model and drawing an analogy to what would correspondingly happen in a human.
[1] eg https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7121329/