my comments with Stan Salthe’s

-snip-

S: Overall, my point is that nature’s workings are mysterious, and we (think we) understand (just a small portion of) them by way of our discourses.

[ph] Yes, and the portion we can codify in language and write in terms that are culturally meaningful to us and relevant to scientific methods is the useful knowledge available it seems to me. The other half is the pointers and hooks that our rule making gives us to be better explorers of the not well described behaviors of complex physical things themselves.

The main jumping off point for me is noting that models have no independent parts and nature is chock full of them, and so asking at what point nature’s individual parts will behave independently and so ‘violate’ the model is important. If you don’t know that all system laws are local and transient you build things like economies to multiply forever.. and don’t notice that at some point many of the parts are reacting in new ways and starting to follow different rules , and it gets you in trouble, that sort of thing.

S: Well, you could say that we need laws, rules and models to show us where they get it wrong, pointingto where more work is needed.

[ph] Yes, I think that’s much the sense I have, that we need science to generate questions as well as answers. It seems to turn our that our answers always fall somewhat short, and continual searching is a much better answer, given the alternatives available.

pfh