Strange Tools by Alva Noë

Author:Alva Noë
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429945257
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

13

Using Models

We don’t get far trying to understand pictures by treating them as stimuli-generating images or pictures in the head. These proposals fail to explain the curious and subtle way things show up for us in pictures. So let’s take seriously the significance of the idea that seeing is not a matter of entertaining mental pictures and that seeing pictures is not a transaction with mental pictures. Let us ask, instead: What do we do when we see, and, in particular, how do we use pictures to achieve access to what they depict?

My proposal is that pictures are a special kind of model. And that a model is something we use to stand in for something else. A model is a proxy. I am not using the word “model” in a technical sense. We are familiar with architect’s models (in balsa wood, say), model airplanes (in plastic), fashion models, and model apartments, not to mention scientific models and animal models in the biosciences. What all these have in common is that they are things we put to work in order to think about or investigate something else. The property agent uses the model apartment to inform you of the nature of the unit you’d actually buy or rent. The scientist’s model provides a structure whose investigation will reveal, say, the behavior of molecules under certain conditions. The fashion model shows you how the clothes look when they are worn at their best, and the animal model in biomedical science is an actual animal, whose reaction to a medicine (say) is supposed to carry information about how a closely related species (human beings) would react to the medicine.

We aren’t tempted to think that the work of the model is somehow psychological. We aren’t tempted to suppose that the model gives rise in us to a representation identical to one in a direct encounter with the thing we are modeling. The clothes look better on the model than they would on me. And the tiny balsa wood model of the house looks in so many respects nothing at all like the house.

No, when it comes to models, it is clear that their effectiveness, their power to show us something, has to do with the way we make them and, critically, with the way we use them. We look at them, study them, think about them. And because of the way we look at them and make use of them, they can inform us about something else, the thing that actually interests us: How does this work?

We use the model house as a substitute for the actual house. And so the question we really need to ask is, Why do we use it as a substitute? And also, What justifies, or what licenses us, to make this substitution?

It’s worth noting two important things about models. First, nothing is a model by virtue of its intrinsic makeup alone. The balsa wood house models the house the architect plans. But he or she might have made the very same construction to serve, instead, as the record of a house built years ago.

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