Robert, The discussions earlier this week about the nature of explanation yielded 2 notions about the necessity of historical contingency in modeling. One referred to 'real historical data', that is, the elements of the model reflect a sampling of some actual situation, and can be explained as some abstract transformation between 2 historical data points. The other referred to the idea of understanding the historical situatedness of the modeling methodologies employed, such that one can explain what one is doing and why. It's probably useful to consider these as different kinds of explanation.
I have not been reading JASSS lately, except when specific papers get recommended, so can't comment on whether their reviewers are pushing for greater validation against historical data. There was a (humbling) article in the 14 June edition of Nature about mentoring better reviewers . As to the methodology notion about explanation, there could be an idea about the responsibility of authors to employ the history of their methodologies when explaining their results across disciplinary or research group silos. I've been reading Thurston ( http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/math/pdf/9404/9404236v1.pdf ) about just how difficult this can be (at least for mathematicians) and Corfield ( http://www.dcorfield.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/HowMathematicians.pdf ) about how research groups might formulate their methodologies and programs so they can be effectively communicated. We might take JASSS to task for setting the bar too low, but to be fair the problem may simply be that this kind of modeling is not far enough along as a discipline for its practitioners to have the training and expertise to do the latter kind of explanation. It may also be that thus far it takes most of a given career to get any good at it. In either case these are early days, and it seems to me there is at least the hint of a path, if there is the will to build towards it. Carl Robert Holmes wrote: > The latest issue of Journal of Artificial Societies and Simulation is > available at http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS.html > > I dunno, after our discussions about the nature of explanation, > reading JASSS left me thoroughly depressed. Want to guess how many > papers compared their simulation results with real historic data? > > Robert > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
