Models as Focusing Tools: Linking Nature and the Social World

Abstract

My paper explores the nature of models as focusing devices in the sciences in general, and the symmetries and asymmetries found in the prevailing global change models linking the relationships between physical processes and social milieus in particular. The asymmetries are linked not merely to the subordinate status assigned to social sciences in these models: either a social science model is seen as providing information about human activities that perturb natural processes or the model takes its biological or physical outcomes as given and attempts to work out the economic, social and political consequences. An argument is made that social science considerations ought to be located in different types of models of global change processes.