Dear Keith

I find a clarity in your contribution to date with respect to underlying
theory that, as you state, is more often implicit in social science
research than explicit. You focus on the ontological assumptions that
underpin MABS research and note that most adopt "implicitly" a nominalist
position. I find this surprising (not your conclusion, but the fact of it)
in that there seems here a discontinuity with what appear to be the
associated epistemological and methodological approachs most common. If I
dichotomise epistemology and methodology in the way you have ontology than
there are two possibilities, respectively positivist and anti-positivist,
and ideographic and nomothetic.The positivist can (safely?) be said to be
looking for deep underlying regularities in social and cultural life,
whereas the opposite (post-structuralist) interest is in contingency and
variability. Similarly we have, say, ethnography or quantitaive studies.
Taken together these distinctions mirror the objective-subjective divide
that plagues the social sciences and leads to (amongst others) debates
about nature and culture.

I had assumed that those working with modelling and simulation were
realists and positivists pursuing nomothetic methods. To be a nominalist
(the universe is a human construction) and a positivist creates some major
tensions in the resulting work, surely. I'm assuming, then, that modellers
are trying to arrive at some universal principles of human action, but from
a subjectivist ontology. I find that interesting. I note that Rosaria
stated in her last message:" aspects of agency, together with a general
theory of social processes is necessary to make predictions from the social
proceesses to the agents' minds, which in my view is the only way to have
theory-based modelling of social matters." Which I took to mean that the
work progresses from abstractions of social processes to the construction
of agents. If I haven't misunderstood this point this suggests a realist
approach, and a consistent epistemology and methodology.

In the social sciences what we really want (I believe) is to occupy the
middle ground on the objective-subjective dimension, to resolve the
nature-culture dichotomy. Many have tried this, Giddens for example, and
also Latour. In terms of a method that may be a grounding for such a theory
I believe complexity theory and the focus on self-organisation,
multi-dimensionality may provide a way - but this as yet is speculation.

My previous, somewhat light-hearted, contribution about Penrose's work was
to point out that there is a critique out there that challenges the very
idea that we can model human agency. Of course Penrose focuses only (I
think) on AI, but there may be relevance for other kinds of computer
modelling of human agency.

As Bruce has pointed out many responses, including mine, did not address
his original request, but many human acts have unintended consequences, and
some of them can be useful and welcome. Perhaps the interest his posting
generated shows that many are still interested in grounding their work
philosophically as well as empirically. Certainly I would welcome more
explicit statements about the underlying assumptions built into people's
work in this area for I fear I may have been labouring under some major
misapprehensions.

AD

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Dr. Alan Dean
Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology
School of Comparative and Applied Social Sciences
The University of Hull
Hull
HU6 7RX
UK

Phone:	+44 (1482) 465743
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Fax:	+44 (1482) 466306
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