Modelling Flashcards
What roles do models play?
Most physical geographers recognise these characteristics of their study system mean that working with all the potential details of it is either impossible or unhelpful.
We therefore usually make models of full reality in which the number of causal factors and their kind and amount of interaction is limited.
Models are effectively trade-offs between pragmatism and the retention in the model of all behaviour that is thought important.
Do models convey the truth?
Truth - often problematic to assume knowledge of true process, but we don’t need to.
Models - simplified approximation to reality with reduced number of variables. “Always wrong, sometimes useful” (Box, 1976).
What is the ‘best model’ of the truth?
Nearness to truth is relative, but information theory (K-L distance) can rank different models even when truth is unknowable.
