Abstract
Many questions about the fundamentals of some area take the form “What is …?” It does not come as a surprise then that, at the dawn of Western philosophy, Socrates asked the questions of what piety, courage, and justice are. Nor is it a wonder that the philosophical preoccupation with computer simulations centered, among other things, about the question of what computer simulations are. Very often, this question has been answered by stating that computer simulation is a species of a well-known method, e.g., experimentation. Other answers claim at least a close relationship between computer simulation and another method. In any case, correct answers to the question of what a computer simulation is should help us to better understand what validation of simulations is. The aim of this chapter is to discuss the most important proposals to understand computer simulation in terms of another method and to trace consequences for validation. Although it has sometimes been claimed that computer simulations are experiments, there are strong reasons to reject this view. A more appropriate proposal is to say that computer simulations often model experiments. This implies that the simulation scientists should to some extent imitate the validation of an experiment. But the validation of computer simulations turns out to be more comprehensive. Computer simulations have also been conceptualized as thought experiments or close cousins of the latter. This seems true, but not very telling since thought experiments are not a standard method and since it is controversial how they contribute to our acquisition of knowledge. I thus consider a specific view on thought experiments to make some progress on understanding simulations and their validation. There is finally a close connection between computer simulation and modeling, and it can be shown that the validation of a computer simulation is the validation of a specific model, which may either be thought to be mathematical or fictional.
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Notes
- 1.
If somebody claims that computer simulations are, say, experiments, then what is claimed may either be regarded as essential of computer simulation (such that it should be included in its definition), or it may be supposed to be a contingent claim about computer simulations. I take it that the views under consideration are meant to capture essential properties of simulations, but this is not necessary for my argument.
- 2.
- 3.
In a computer simulation, the computer hardware may of course be subject to influences not controlled for. But this is typically excluded by activities of verification, see below.
- 4.
Our focus in this section is exclusively on scientific thought experiments. Philosophers too engage in thought experimentation, but it is at least arguable that thought experimentation in philosophy and the sciences function quite differently.
- 5.
They also include experiments under this description, but in the last section, we have already noted crucial differences between experiment and simulation.
- 6.
There is no need here to draw on Nersessian’s view that thought experimenting involves mental modeling since we’ll examine simulations and models in due course in Sect. 37.4.
- 7.
This mark is not sufficient for a good thought experiment because even a valid argument can arrive at a wrong conclusion if some premise is false. But this complication does not matter for our argument.
- 8.
Baumberger et al. (2017) have recently proposed to frame validationcs using notions from argumentation theory. But this conceptualization of validationcs is independent of the argument view.
- 9.
We might also have provided a slightly different argument to represent a run of a computer simulation program: The idea would be that the premises state the computational model. Now the latter is defined such that results of the simulations are exact solutions to the computational model. So it is not an issue anymore to check that the argument is deductive. But the work of validation is only shifted to the examination of the premises. For instance, if we want to make a case that the computational model is sufficiently accurate by drawing on prior commitments to theory, we must show that the theory is likely sufficiently accurate and that it is appropriately reflected in the computational model.
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I’m grateful to Julie Jebeile and Nicole J. Saam for useful comments and criticism.
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Beisbart, C. (2019). What is a Computer Simulation and What does this Mean for Simulation Validation?. In: Beisbart, C., Saam, N. (eds) Computer Simulation Validation. Simulation Foundations, Methods and Applications. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70766-2_37
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