Models

Extract:

Models in cognitive and related sciences are part of an overarching methodology, computational or broadly formal modelling, that aims to test, refine, and showcase our understandings of brain, cognition, and behaviour. In their foundational book Models as Mediators, Mary S. Morgan and Margaret Morrison (1999) make the case that models play a mediatory role in science between what we observe and what we want to build to house our understandings, theories. Under this conception of models, known as the pragmatic view, we can carve out not only their unique role, but also why and how they must be protected from forces that do not prize understanding. Taking a broad perspective that sees all human activity that strives towards understanding as scientific or as under our purview as modellers, allows for this characterisation of models as mediators to be more generally fruitful.