Keith Sawyer wrote:
> Yes, in your posting you talk like a methodological individualist. I am
> surprised, considering your rejection of economics! How do you feel about
> those few MABS that explicitly model macrosocial phenomena--like Carley's,
> and like some of the multi-level simulations (CORMAS) that explicitly model
> social entities?
In the current (Sept. 2000) issue of Computational and Mathematical
Organization Theory, I have a paper setting out an abstract, canonical
framework relating the Carley models I think you have in mind to one of my
models and the Stanford Virtual Design Team (VDT) model. The VDT model is
shown to subsume my model and mine to subsume Carley's. There are no
incompatitiblities among these models even though Carley's concern is
organisational structure, mine is the consideration of effective social
behaviour agents are specified in consultation with the target decision makers
and the VDT model imposes an information processing model of the organisation
on their specification. (An earlier version with a slightly different title is
at http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/cpmrep49.html)
So if you see Carley as a social realist and me as a methodological
individualist, either my paper is badly flawed or these are simply
inappropriate distinctions for social simulation research as practiced by (at
least) Carley and me.
And this is actually the point I had in mind in my last posting: The
distinctions being made by Keith and others do not seem relevant to my work or
my understanding of the work of colleagues in the social simulation community.
Finally, I see social simulation as the computational investigation of the
effects or consequences of interaction among social entities. The social
entities might for some purposes be whole organisations, for other purposes,
departments or groups within organisations and for yet others representations
of individual people might be appropriate. The collection of interacting
entities and the outcomes from their interactions are presumably characteristic
of some social institution or organisation or grouping. A model of such social
interaction can only be validated against some target, interacting collection
of social entities. I guess this is what I would call a social institution. I
have no reason to consider whether the institution so defined is more
fundamental or real than the individual entities or conversely. I do not see
how such a consideration would usefully inform modelling or validation of a
model. Both component entities and institutions must generate some qualitative
or statistical evidence if the model is to be validated.
Bruce Edmonds dealt with similar issues and reached similar conclusions in his
"Pragmatic Holism" paper in Foundations of Science, 1999, 4:57-82. An earlier
version is at http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/~bruce/praghol/
--
Professor Scott Moss
Director
Centre for Policy Modelling
Manchester Metropolitan University
Aytoun Building
Manchester M1 3GH
UNITED KINGDOM
telephone: +44 (0)161 247 3886
fax: +44 (0)161 247 6802
http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/~scott
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