Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 56.
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        Date: 2023-05-30 05:44:11+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: rules, models, conventions

Many here will likely know about if not have read Lorraine Daston's
Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton, 2022). The book
has been well reviewed by Colin Burrow (Senior Research Fellow, All
Souls, Oxford) in "Algorithmic Fanboy", London Review of Books 45.11,
for 1 June 2023. If I'm not mistaken, the review is freely accessible
online, at https://www.lrb.co.uk.

For this crowd--forgive me narrowing it too much, if I do--what's
particularly interesting is the structure that Daston gives to the whole
and very wide field of rules and regulations, and modelling's place in
it. Burrow explains:

> Daston divides ‘rules’ into three broad kinds: tools of measurement,
> models or paradigms, and laws. The 3rst and third of these are more
> or less self-evident: one set of things we call ‘rulers’ provide
> consistent measurements of lines, while the other, lawmakers, impose
> consistency in the judgment of behaviour. Both display and encourage
> what we call ‘regularity’. But the second of these three types of
> rule – the rule which takes the form of a paradigmatic example – is
> less familiar. In the pre-modern world an individual or an instance
> of a building or a statue could serve as a guide to later examples.
> Such a paradigmatic instance of an art or an entity might be
> described as a ‘model’ or a ‘canon’ and that word (canon) derives
> from the name of the giant cane plant, which grows dead straight and
> so could be used as a ruler or tool of measurement. Pliny the Elder
> described Polykleitos’s statue of a spear-bearer as a ‘canon’ or
> ‘model statue’ that could be used as a guide or rule for later
> artists in representing the human form. The actions of a model of
> conduct (Jesus, or St Benedict) could also provide a broad ‘rule’ for
> behaviour. Daston argues that we’ve almost lost the capacity to think
> of a ‘model’ as a rule in this broad sense, and one aim of her book
> is to explain and recuperate this conception of what a rule might
> be.
 >
> A rule in the form of a ‘model’ or a ‘canon’ doesn’t prescribe a
> particular form of behaviour, since a ‘canonical’ sculpture could act
> as a model for later statues in a di1erent stone or with curlier
> hair. That makes it a kind of rule which Daston would describe as
> ‘thick’ or ‘supple’, since it embraces many possible particularities.
> ‘Thick’ rules of this kind ‘did not aim to anticipate all
> particulars. Rather, they drew attention to the range and kinds of
> deviations and exceptions to the rules,’ and they required discretion
> and experience of a number of analogous instances in order to apply
> them. A pre-modern ‘thick rule’ might be akin to the instructions
> you’d give someone who knows how to cook when telling them how to
> make your favourite pasta. They’d have the experience to be able to
> supply the unstated details (chop up the garlic before you put it in
> the pan, get a saucepan out, turn on the gas). ‘Thin’ rules, by
> contrast, typically address very speci3c circumstances, and would
> include the kinds of detailed regulation that stop you taking your
> hamster or your shaving foam on a 0ight to New York.

Most discussions of models and modelling begin with applications, move
outward from them. Taking a broad, historical view of the even wider
subject of rules gives us a different way of thinking about the
modelling machine. One would expect no less from Daston.

Burrows' review also nudges me into mentioning once again Martin
Brückner, Sandy Isenstadt and Sarah Wasserman's Modelwork: The Material
Culture of Making and Knowing (Minnesota, 2021)--and, for the first
time, Jonah Lynch's fine review of this book, "Same and different: How
models contribute to knowing", just out in print in Interdisciplinary
Science Reviews 48.1: 145-57.

In computational terms one used to begin with an ontology, from that to
a model, then a flowchart, then code--or such was the doctrine. Now
systems do the model-building from patterns detected in large masses of
data. Presumably there's a model of what to look for, what defines a
'pattern' in statistical terms. What do these models tell us--not just
about the economy, say, but about how we think? About he Zeitgeist, the
cultural envelope within which we live? Is there a signal in all the noise?

Comments, even sobriety, welcome!

Yours,
WM

--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews;  Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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