Chris, (01)
Your criticisms are well taken. When tossing off an email note,
it's hard to spell out all the detailed qualifications that may
be needed to make it solid and unassailable. But that is why
we need email exchanges like these. (02)
> Well, I don't know about *all* the hard work -- constructing
> a good model can be very difficult! (03)
I agree. (04)
> Thus, if I want to construct a formal model of, say, the
> faculty and administrative structure at Texas A&M University
> -- professorial and administrative ranks, departments, salaries,
> who answers to whom, etc... (05)
This is an excellent example, because it illustrates important
distinctions between human artifacts and natural phenomena: (06)
1. Natural phenomena evolve according to the laws of physics,
chemistry, biology, etc., many of which are unknown. Even
laws that are correctly represented in mathematical formulae
cannot be solved precisely because of experimental errors
in the input data and the computational complexity of doing
the calculations. (07)
2. Designs of artifacts originate in human conceptions that
are finite and capable, at least in principle, of being
specified precisely. (08)
3. However, any implementation of an artifact in a physical
object may lead to complications that result from the
interactions of physical laws with human conceptions.
The best laid plans for artifacts "gang aft a-gley." (09)
4. Spontaneous social interactions of humans have all the
complexity of any biological phenomena with the addition
of further complexity caused by the big brains and egos
involved. Therefore, they belong to the category of
natural phenomena. (010)
5. Legal systems of any kind (which include the administrative
structure of TAMU) have the nature of artifacts, which are
specified by a finite set of laws and therefore capable,
in principle, of being modeled precisely. (011)
6. But humanly defined laws are rarely run through a theorem
prover to check consistency. Even those that happen to be
consistent rarely anticipate all possible interactions with
natural phenomena (floods, earthquakes, etc.), all other
social institutions (governmental and nongovernmental), and
human variations and foibles (e.g., a mathematician like
Erdos, who would be a prize that any university would bend
the rules to hire). (012)
For the above reasons, it is safe to say that there are few,
if any, models that are perfectly true of whatever aspect of
reality they are intended to characterize. (013)
This is one more statement of the challenge of knowledge soup: (014)
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/challenge.pdf (015)
John (016)
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