Top Highlights

• First, the relation between models and model descriptions is stipulative: Models are created by their descriptions. Second, this relationship involves logical satisfaction: Every part of the model has the properties and relations asserted of it by the model description.
• The third and fourth aspects of a model’s construal are its fidelity criteria. While the assignment and scope describe how the real-world phenomenon is intended to be represented with the model, fidelity criteria describe how similar the model must be to the world in order to be considered an adequate representation. There are two types of fidelity...
• There are other aspects of representational capacity that are relevant for mathematical and computational models. Some kinds of mathematical structures are continuous, which means that infinitesimal changes in the domain are mapped to infinitesimal changes in the range. Many traditional mathematical models such as the ones found in classical mechan...
• According to a straightforward view, we can think of idealization as a departure from complete, veridical representation of real-world phenomena. In idealization, we distort or misrepresent our target by representing it as having properties that it does not have (Jones, 2005). In other words, a model is idealized with respect to its target when it ...
• The first kind of nontarget-directed modeling occurs when a generalized phenomenon is chosen as a target, not a specific instance of that phenomenon. This is the case, for example, when one is interested in studying the properties of evolution in general or chemical bonding in general. I call this type of modeling modeling a generalized target. Mod...