Wrong models – a brief note

"Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful" (George E. P. Box). Well put – but essentially, all we have is "models" and all "usefulness" is based on having "models" of sorts – life, as we know it, would be very hard or impossible without them... So what about "wrong", then? It seems to imply a certain "correspondence theory of truth": since there is never an exact correspondence between a model (a description of various levels of complexity) and the "state of affairs" (or the "thing itself"), all models are "wrong". But perhaps it is "wrong" to expect such an exact correspondence as a measure of truth? Our observations are always more or less "modelled"... A drawing of a landscape is usually not dismissed as "wrong" because it shows only contours and shades, omitting an indefinite amount of details... Its "model" (in another sense of the word) is something like the essentials of observation and not the natural landscape "as such".

My "Rosebud"?

The smell of clean, damp, slightly frozen sheets, taken from the washing line on a crispy morning. Helping my sister, perhaps – I am not sure about that, but the obscure image came to me suddenly this morning – to carry the laundry into the house to melt and dry. Maybe.

But maybe I just try to complement the strangely material tissue of this memory, consisting of the pleasant smell and its associations, the slanted late autumn sunlight, a dialogue between coolness and warmth, with a situation whose two personal agents are my sister and I.

I guess the most essential part of my memory consists of such an "imperfect", frail tissue, half-dreamt but no less real. Reaching towards the immemorial beyond, beneath memory.