Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures, Tables, and Boxes
- Preface
- 1 Modelling as a Method of Enquiry
- 2 Model-Making: New Recipes, Ingredients, and Integration
- 3 Imagining and Imaging: Creating a New Model World
- 4 Character Making: Ideal Types, Idealization, and the Art of Caricature
- 5 Metaphors and Analogies: Choosing the World of the Model
- 6 Questions and Stories: Capturing the Heart of Matters
- 7 Model Experiments?
- 8 Simulation: Bringing a Microscope into Economics
- 9 Model Situations, Typical Cases, and Exemplary Narratives
- 10 From the World in the Model to the Model in the World
- Index
- Plate Section
- References
7 - Model Experiments?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures, Tables, and Boxes
- Preface
- 1 Modelling as a Method of Enquiry
- 2 Model-Making: New Recipes, Ingredients, and Integration
- 3 Imagining and Imaging: Creating a New Model World
- 4 Character Making: Ideal Types, Idealization, and the Art of Caricature
- 5 Metaphors and Analogies: Choosing the World of the Model
- 6 Questions and Stories: Capturing the Heart of Matters
- 7 Model Experiments?
- 8 Simulation: Bringing a Microscope into Economics
- 9 Model Situations, Typical Cases, and Exemplary Narratives
- 10 From the World in the Model to the Model in the World
- Index
- Plate Section
- References
Summary
Introduction
How can we characterize the way scientific modelling works? In Chapter 1, I suggested economists use models as a means of investigation or enquiry: they both enquire into the small worlds in their models, and use those enquiries as a way to interrogate the nature of the world. In this chapter I explore how these kinds of enquiries work by treating model-based reasoning as akin to experimental investigations.
Treating model reasoning as a form of experiment inevitably raises questions about the nature of such experiments. In Chapter 6, I portrayed model usage as a process of asking questions about the circumscribed and limited world in the model and using the model to derive answers about that small world. This is a process in which scientist and model are jointly active participants: neither is passive – the scientist experiments by manipulating the model, that is, he or she uses the model’s resources (both its subject specific and deductive resources) to demonstrate answers to questions of interest to the scientist. In this chapter I show how the heart of the experimental action lies first in the ways a model’s resources are used to demonstrate answers to questions about that model world, and second in using these experimental demonstrations to make inferences from that model world to the real one.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The World in the ModelHow Economists Work and Think, pp. 256 - 300Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012