Recently I’ve also been thinking about something that seems vaguely related, which could perhaps be called inference in the map vs inference in the territory.
Suppose you want to know how some composite system works. This might be a rigid body object made up of molecules, a medicine made out of chemicals to treat a disease that is ultimately built out of chemicals, a social organisation method designed for systems made out of people, or anything like that.
In that case there are two ways you can proceed: either think about the individual components of the system and deduce from their behavior how the system will behave, or just build the system in reality and observe how the aggregate behaves.
If you do the former, you can apply already-known theory about the components to deduce it’s behavior without needing to test it in reality. Though often in practice this theory won’t be known, or will be too expensive to use, or similar. So in practice one generally has to investigate it holistically. But this requires using the territory as a map to figure it out.
(When investigating it holistically there is also the possibility of just using holistic rather than reductionistic theories. Often this holistic theory will originate from one of the previous methods though, e.g. our math for rigid body dynamics comes from actual experience with rigid bodies. Though also sometimes it might come from other places, e.g. evolutionary reasoning. So my dichotomy isn’t quite as clean as yours, probably.)
Recently I’ve also been thinking about something that seems vaguely related, which could perhaps be called inference in the map vs inference in the territory.
Suppose you want to know how some composite system works. This might be a rigid body object made up of molecules, a medicine made out of chemicals to treat a disease that is ultimately built out of chemicals, a social organisation method designed for systems made out of people, or anything like that.
In that case there are two ways you can proceed: either think about the individual components of the system and deduce from their behavior how the system will behave, or just build the system in reality and observe how the aggregate behaves.
If you do the former, you can apply already-known theory about the components to deduce it’s behavior without needing to test it in reality. Though often in practice this theory won’t be known, or will be too expensive to use, or similar. So in practice one generally has to investigate it holistically. But this requires using the territory as a map to figure it out.
(When investigating it holistically there is also the possibility of just using holistic rather than reductionistic theories. Often this holistic theory will originate from one of the previous methods though, e.g. our math for rigid body dynamics comes from actual experience with rigid bodies. Though also sometimes it might come from other places, e.g. evolutionary reasoning. So my dichotomy isn’t quite as clean as yours, probably.)