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How Much Do Models Influence Our Thinking?
OCatenac writes: "Frank Schirrmacher, head of the arts and science department for the influential German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, considers the question of how much metaphor and model influence our view of the world."
If you rely too much on metaphors and models to base your decisions on then you are going to get burned. The real world is never as clean and perfect as a modeled environment. Models should only be used for an initial inspection of how something should be approached. Prior to implementation, a more direct, hands-on method needs to be used in order to work out any bugs. This applies to any sort of project where modeling is used; software, hardware, geological exploration, architecture, sociology, etc.
Chris DiBona
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Grant Chair, Linux Int.
Pres, SVLUG
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
I think that our brains are "wired" to use models to describe thing. They are useful - no, essential - for communicating complicated ideas to other people.
A mathematical equation such as a line, curve, or a plan can't really be imagined without a model using the Cartesian co-ordinate system. After hundreds of years, it's still the best thing that we have. Models are also important in science, which is replete with things that cannot be directly observed - and therefore require modeling. The atom. The quark. String theory.
The model is a valuable human mental tool.
A model, in a way, is language to express ideas. Much of our knowledge today that we take for granted today is built on the knowledge from our ancestors.
George Orwell said it well in 1984... If you control the language, you control thoughts:
If you breed breed out the concept of "freedom" and take related words out of the lexicon, you can control your population so that they don't know that they're free. Even if someone has a thought in his head that he's not free, he can't communicate that idea to others.
Similarly, if you create new language (or models), you allow new thoughts to form.
Some psychology guy proposed this decades ago... The Whorfian hypothesis. It is a neat idea, although I don't recall why, it was discounted.
A google search reveals oodles of material.
I think 1984 was written around the time this was a big idea.
Language doesn't control our thoughts, but it does strongly affect how we express them (for obvious reasons.) To steal an example from Pinker, 1994: The fact that you can be unable to find the right words to express "what you meant to say" is, among other possible illustrations, a demonstration that lingustic determinism just doesn't totally make sense.
Creating a new model doesn't necessarily allow new thoughts to form -- but it gives a different way of looking at a situation, and lets the creator of that model express his thoughts more clearly to himself and to others, which can lead to better-developed theories and better communication of thoughts.
You can't not have a concept just because you don't have a word for it. It's just that you can't talk about it without the words.
Some years ago, frustrated by what I felt were deficiencies in the typical business models of the day, I found myself writing a paper on developing a more organic model for analysis/description of system processes for a class in organization theory.
The article talks about HAL, "2001", and nanotechnology as well as the concept of the invention overtaking the inventor. My paper used certain ideas I found in the "Dune" series. Interesting that part of the Golden Path most clearly described in "God Emperor of Dune" involves a response to the foreseen possibility of the annihilation of humans by Ixian technology.
I think the ongoing challenge is to develop technology that supports a more organic model of ourselves and our world. The old business models of the pyramid or concentric layers are deficient not only because they inadequately describes the organization, but becauses they shape thinking into seeing organizations in static terms.
Life, it's possibilities and dangers, is less adequately described in terms of the linear dynamics of classic vectors then by elements of fractal modeling which is essentially based on clear boundaries, but my, the surprises within!!
We have met the enemy and he is us - Pogo (Walt Kelly)
As a scientist I know all about models and the limitations inherent in them. Challenge the basic assumption and question the models based on them. Never be blinded by absolutism. Lord Kelvin was convinced that the Earth was much younger than that proposed by geologists. Kelvin based his model on the thermal cooling of a molten body. Unfortunately, he did not factor in an additional factor that was just discovered, radioactive heating.
I can't remember what T.C. Chamberlain's exact published quote was in response to Lord Kelvin, but it went something like this: The facinating impressionism of mathematical models with all their precision and elegance should not blind us to the deficits that premise the whole process.
This was published 100 yrs ago. If you need a translation, then here it is: If your fancy pants model is wrong, it is wrong. This also applies for those that choose to predict the future.
We know this to be false, because of studies of other cultures where there are very few color words (White, Black, and Red, for instance). These people can discriminate between pink and purple just fine, even though their vocabulary doesn't allow them to verbally make distinctions between these colors. So people can perceive what their hardware is set up to perceive, even if they don't have any words to describe what they are perceiveing.
On the other hand, people also have a short-term memory limit of 5 to 9 (7 +/- 2) chunks of information. A good model can turn 15 to 20 unrelated pieces of informaion into three or four chunks -- which can all be held in short-term memory at one time and mentally manipulated. So having a good model will make some thoughts possible that would be impossible (because of the limitations of short-term memory) without the model.
however, I think you are largely overstating the supposed doubtlessness of your stronger proposition, that models and metaphors are the world itself. it makes sense in a po-mo context, but if you think academia's opinion-of-the-week on the nature of reality is 1) universally accepted across schools of thought and cultures, and 2) not going to change in a decade or two, then well... i'll have to respectfully disagree with you.
more generally, I'd say it's always good to weigh good old common sense in front of the latest theory. postmodernism has revealed some rather large gaps in so-called objectivity, and I'm the first to rejoice of it -- but I do'nt necessarily buy its stronger claims, and I do think that the word "truth" still *sometimes* makes sense.
It's called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and Brown and Lenneburg showed in their paper "Hanunoo color categories" (undoubtedly misspelled) that linguistic terms for colors did in fact affect color discrimination.
Now as to the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that you can't think about things you can't say -- something neither Whorf nor Sapir ever said anything close to, but if they read about the work in deconstructionism that they're being called the originators of, they'd just shit -- of course that's nonsense. But there's enough evidence and has been for years that linguistic constructs affect such fundamental cognitive mechanisms as color discrimination, and we ignore the effects of language on thought at our peril.
Whorf and Sapir were linguists, not psychologists, though the field of psycholinguistics arose (in part) from their work.
Many, many years ago psycholinguistics was one of the things I took more courses in than many others.