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Minds and Machines
Erschienen in: Minds and Machines 1/2019

26.11.2018

Peeking Inside the Black Box: A New Kind of Scientific Visualization

verfasst von: Michael T. Stuart, Nancy J. Nersessian

Erschienen in: Minds and Machines | Ausgabe 1/2019

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Abstract

Computational systems biologists create and manipulate computational models of biological systems, but they do not always have straightforward epistemic access to the content and behavioural profile of such models because of their length, coding idiosyncrasies, and formal complexity. This creates difficulties both for modellers in their research groups and for their bioscience collaborators who rely on these models. In this paper we introduce a new kind of visualization (observed in a qualitative study of a systems biology laboratory) that was developed to address just this sort of epistemic opacity. The visualization is unusual in that it depicts the dynamics and structure of a computer model instead of that model’s target system, and because it is generated algorithmically. Using considerations from epistemology and aesthetics, we explore how this new kind of visualization increases scientific understanding of the content and function of computer models in systems biology to reduce epistemic opacity.
Vorheriger Artikel Simulation, Epistemic Opacity, and ‘Envirotechnical Ignorance’ in Nuclear Crisis
Nächster Artikel Robotic Simulations, Simulations of Robots

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Fußnoten
1
See Pritchard (2010, 74), Hempel (1965, 334), Kitcher (1989, 419), Grimm (2008) and De Regt (2009, 588), Khalifa (2012), Strevens (2013), Hills (2015) and Hannon (forthcoming).
 
2
See Lenhard (2006), Stuart (2016, 2018), Wilkenfeld (2013, 2014, 2017) and Wilkenfeld and Hellmann (2014).
 
3
See Baumberger (2011), Baumberger and Brun (2016), Dellsén (2018), Elgin (2007), Kvanvig (2009), Khalifa (2013), Wilkenfeld (2014) and Kelp (2015).
 
4
Elgin sometimes uses a different strategy that may amount to the same thing, using the notion of “metaphorical exemplification,” that is, non-literal exemplification. Thus, a lifeless painting can instantiate optimism, and a mathematical proof can instantiate elegance (Elgin 2002). The painting made of canvass and paint has no feelings, so it is not literally optimistic. But we agree that it’s an optimistic painting, so it instantiates optimism “metaphorically.” This argument depends on considerations about the difference between what is metaphorical and what is not, which we will not go into here.
 
5
Of course, new knowledge might be produced as well. For example, the diagram can provide warrant for claims about the existence of those new pathways in the model’s target system since (a) the diagram is counterfactually dependent on the computer model and (b) we have independent evidence that the model is accurate, so we can infer that this feature of the model is at least plausibly also instantiated in reality. But even in cases where no new knowledge is produced (e.g., there are no new pathways), we can still gain new understanding of the computational model through the diagram.
 
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Metadaten
Titel
Peeking Inside the Black Box: A New Kind of Scientific Visualization
verfasst von
Michael T. Stuart
Nancy J. Nersessian
Publikationsdatum
26.11.2018
Verlag
Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in
Minds and Machines / Ausgabe 1/2019
Print ISSN: 0924-6495
Elektronische ISSN: 1572-8641
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-018-9484-3

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