3 Comments

Rick, That experience with 'Zen &' was the beginning of my inquiry into the philosophy of science, wondering why scientists had given up philosophical thinking about what they were doing. Your example is a great one regarding the different levels of explanation. Love it.

Expand full comment

Chris - a great series of posts. Brings me back to group meetings at MSU in the 70s, or evenings discussing Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" over a glass of wine. This post resonates with me particularly because we frequently use these models/analogies when we teach our students. Our goal is to take something complex and make it comprehensible at the students' level of knowledge. And then later in advanced courses, we may offer a new model, explaining that what we taught them earlier was a simplification, a model that worked withing a set of limits, but that we now generalize to a broader set of limits. A good example in classic analytical chemistry is the equilibrium expression, K = [products] / [reactants, which we later inform the students, is a simplification - it should really be the activities of the species, not their concentrations...

Expand full comment

I really appreciate the visual examples you use and the important point that each model or technique for representing something highlights important aspects but can't capture all of the aspects. I'm thinking about, then, the way that sometimes in our minds we can grasp quite a complex system--either completely or partially intuitively--and yet still need techniques and tools (language) for conveying and explaining, and that will necessarily have multiple parts to it.

Expand full comment