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Imagination and Imaging in Model Building

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Mary S. Morgan
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Abstract

Modelling became one of the primary tools of mathematical economic research in the twentieth century, but when we look at examples of how nonanalogical models were first built in economics, both the process of making representations and aspects of the representing relation remain opaque. Like early astronomers, economists have to imagine how the hidden parts of their world are arranged and to make images, that is, create models, to represent how they work. The case of the Edgeworth Box, a model widely used for theoretical work in twentieth-century economics, provides a good example to explore the process of making mathematical representations of the economy. It shows how, in making these new representations, conceptual elements were developed which could not have been represented in the older verbal forms of economics.

Type
The Pragmatics of Scientific Representation
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 71 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2002 Biennial Meeting of The Philosophy of Science Association. Part II: Symposia Papers , December 2004 , pp. 753 - 766
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I thank all those numerous individuals who have discussed these particular issues of model building with me, especially my colleagues at the University of Amsterdam and the London School of Economics and in my host departments at UC Berkeley and University of Pennsylvania during 2000–2001. I thank Till Gruene and Chiara Baroni for research assistance, Tom Humphrey for permission to use his diagram, and the British Academy for funding this research.

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