Constituting or Instituting Modelling Measurements (original) (raw)

Abstract

"In order to be successful as a research programme in the life sciences, modelling and simulation need to be meaningfully connected to experiments. Indeed, the realism of the model depends upon successfully making this connection. This paper discusses the crucial role of measurement in bringing about this interconnection. Models and simulations are empty of empirical content without being parameterised by data acquired from experiments; and they further require connection with the experiments in order to be validated. There is still not consensus in the field regarding how validation should be considered, and this is exacerbated when the models shift outside of disciplinary domains, for example, when they shift from settings dominated by mathematics and engineering to settings dominated by clinical aims and concerns. In Carusi, Burrage and Rodriguez (2012 and 2013), we showed that experiment, model and simulation should be considered to be a hybrid system of interconnected processes in order to interpret the results of any validation test. Since it cannot be assumed in advance that the results of laboratory experiments and computational simulations can be meaningfully compared to each other in a validation test, we proposed that the iterative relations between these stages of the process go towards establishing grounds of comparability. This paper discusses two examples of the way in which comparability is dealt with in the cardiac modelling research programme, one taken from the inception of the cardiac modelling research programme experimental system when the Hodgkin-Huxley model of electrical excitation in nerve cells was first adapted for cardiac cells, and one taken from a current development in this research programme, which is developing a population of models approach to exploring the interconnections between models and experiments. These examples will show how quantitative results of modelling and experimenting are interpreted, established as significant, and result in further articulations of both modelling source and target domain: these are all aspects in which the emerging grounds of comparability are manifested in the modelling and experimenting process. The second part of the paper considers what philosophical accounts might be given of the way in which grounds of comparability come to be established, and draws upon accounts of art and literature for this. Grounds of comparability have to do with a relationship at the heart of ‘realist’ art and literature, that is the ways in which symbolic systems relate in a generative way to objects in the world. Two accounts are particularly promising: The first is Joseph Rouse’s description of experimental systems as ‘materialized fictional “worlds”’ which are domain constituting in that they ‘help constitute the fields of possible judgment and the conceptual norms that allow [conceptualizable] features to show themselves intelligibly’ (51). The second is Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the coherent deformations brought about by style, and the way in which these institute (rather than constitute) systems of equivalence which articulate a field of interactions in which things can be experienced or counted as equivalent. These two accounts – the constitutive and the institutive – approach the process of establishing measurements that count from different directions: Rouse’s constitutive approach from a conceptual standpoint, and Merleau-Ponty’s from a non-conceptual standpoint. The presentation will focus on the constitutive account, and point to the gaps in it which call for something closer to the institutive account. NOTE: Due to illness, I was unable to attend the conference and the paper was not delivered] - References Carusi, A., Burrage, K., Rodriguez, B. (2012) Bridging experiments, models and simulations: an integrative approach to validation in computational cardiac electrophysiology. American Journal of Physiology – Heart. vol. 303 no. 2 H144-H155. Carusi, A., Burrage, K., Rodriguez, B. (2013) Model Systems in Computational Systems Biology. In Juan Duran and Eckhart Arnold (Eds.): Computer Simulations and the Changing Face of Scientific Experimentation, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1993) Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence. In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Northwestern University Press. Rouse, J. (2009) Models as fictions. In Mauricio Suarez (Ed). Fictions in Science: Philosophical Essays on Modeling and Idealization. Routledge. "

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