WHAT IS A MODEL

Let’s be totally honest here, the world is very complex and hard to understand, no matter how brainy you are. To make things easier to grasp, reality is generally broken down into bitesize chunks. These chunks are abstracted from the real world and simplified into things called models. This is the standard way science works. Models come in various forms so people even professional modelers are often unsure about what exactly models are. Here I present four types of model. This makes the meaning of ’model’ discussed here unashamedly broad. It’s hard to escape the term ’model’, since it is used in many contexts, but the typology offered should help make sense of things modelers do and why it’s necessary.