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Seeing Systems: A Conceptual Resource

Ned O'Gorman, Jessica Robinson, Paul McKean, Matt Pitchford, Mary Grace Hebert, Ned Prutzer, Sally Jackson, Jessica Landau, Jeffrey Proulx, Melissa Seifert, Natalie Lambert, Kristina Williams, Gabe Malo, elizaBeth Simpson, Fabian Prieto-Nanez, Nikki Weickum, Kevin Hamilton, Authors

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Model

Models in systems theory seem to be means of both understanding and testing systems. We create a model to extract or identify "essential or interesting features that can be studied through analysis of the model" (Poole, 60). 

Models would seem to need to be formal--that is, they are characterized by rigorous methods, formal rules, and other means of rule-bound abstracting and idealizing. 

Poole does mention informal models--or "models expressed in ordinary language" (60)--but the latter seems to me (Ned O) not to be a model at all, since but rather more generically a representation

Yet, not all models are representations: one could create a model of a system that in no way claims to re-represent something in the empirical world. 
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