At the end of my last post, I pointed out that model building is inherently not metaphysical.  Because the only strict criteria for the success of a model is that it fits empirical data, it says nothing about how the world “got that way.”  From the stark, positivistic definition of the word “meaning,” I would like to argue that anything more is meaningless.

For the rest of this post, I will define a statement to be meaningful if it asserts something empirical about the world.  The statement “The earth is round.” is meaningful because one can test this assertion by viewing the earth from space (assuming your definition of earth and round are the conventional ones).  The statement “the earth is beautiful” is not directly meaningful, since there is no obvious definition of the word “beautiful” which allows one to conduct an experiment to test this assertion.  Any type of question with the word “why” in it cannot have a complete, meaningful answer.  For example, conservation of energy is “why” a pendulum never swings higher than the point from which it was dropped, but one is then left with why energy is conserved.   Empirical tests can only see if something does or does not happen- data does not provide a narrative.  To answer a why question scientifically, one eventually must state the fundamental, unproven assumptions of a model.

It is precisely for this reason that I think we can do nothing better than build a model of reality.  Any meaningful theory will tell us how to interpret data, so we cannot even in principle be certain that we are not making simplifying assumptions in how we measure something.  Even outside the realm of science, we rely on informal models.  Marxism provides a (falsified to the extent it is falsifiable?) model of how history develops, as do many other political ideologies.  None of the narrative portions of such political ideologies are meaningful in my strict definition of the word.  Even in every day life, we informally model the behavior of others and act according to our predictions.  Such models clearly have unfalsifiable portions (what precisely does it mean to have a “bad day” for example), which must on some level be meaningless.  Thus, in all endeavors, I believe that model building is the best we can do.  We can use our models as a way of thinking about the world, but it is meaningless to say that our models have anything to with “how things really work.”