Why do I need a model?

Abstract

Some of the reasons for using models in scientific research have already been mentioned in the last chapter. The need for simple ways of expressing the relationships between basic entities in the search for a solution to a problem encourages us to use a language capable of making abstractions from the complexity of the world we are trying to understand. Many of these problems are too complex to be solved by commonsense rules of thumb or by intuition, and the use of words by themselves is not usually a satisfactory way of describing relationships. We use models because they reduce ambiguity and because they describe complexity with the maximum parsimony.