Jeezum… from the blog about stuff Integral (aka Ken Wilber et al) Mystery of Existence,
Dangers of models
In writing the aqal review of local organizations, and also talking with a friend yesterday who’s very much into integral things, I am reminded of the dangers of Spiral Dynamics, and of any map, framework or model.As with any map, or sets of ideas, it can be taken as a relative or an absolute truth, it can be used in service of shadow projections, and it can be used with more or less heart and empathy.
Relative and absolute truths
The clearest danger is in taking it as an absolute truth, to mistake the map for the terrain, to put more faith in and emphasis on what the model says rather than what the terrain is doing.
Seeing any map as a relative truth, it becomes a tool of temporary and practical value, an aid for navigating and functioning in the world. There is nothing absolute about it. Just a tool that works more or less well in any situation. A tool with no inherent value, which can be modified and discarded as needed. It remains secondary to the terrain, to life itself.
“Just a tool that works more or less well in any situation.” No, a model works for exacting reasons in only situations for which those reasons hold. Always the question begged by a model has to do with how these reasons are commensurate with a precise situation where the utility of the model is demonstrable.
The model is not the thing modeled. A model describes and may depict operations. If you could start up a model of an internal combustion engine it would not be a model.
The description is not the thing described. The danger implicit in any model comes about from their reification. This turn immediatly causes a category error. It does so even if the utility of a model lends itself to the description of predictable consequences of the operations of the thing modeled.
Models may be more or less accurate but they cannot be absolutely true. Their accuracy refers to the accuracy of their description, and given predictive utility, their predictions. But, models are by their categorical (or domain) nature are always, by definition,always reductive.
Every model’s utility is constrained for many reasons but one of the primary reasons is that for every model the implicate description is not complete, nor can it be completely accurate. It is okay to qualify the truthfulness of the description compilation and the model itself, but absurd to say a model is itself and otherwise relatively or absolutely true. A model is true relative to a qualified frame of reference. If you can think of a universal model unhinged from a relation to a frame of reference, please let me know!
And, now I must go on at length about a very pet peeve.
