laplace’s demon and the adventures of his apprentices（拉普拉斯的魔鬼和他的学徒的冒险）.pdfVIP

Laplace’s Demon and the Adventures of His Apprentices Roman Frigg, Seamus Bradley, Hailiang Du, and Leonard A. Smith*y The sensitive dependence on initial conditions ðSDICÞ associated with nonlinear models imposes limitations on the models’ predictive power. We draw attention to an additional limitation than has been underappreciated, namely, structural model error ðSMEÞ. A model has SME if the model dynamics differ from the dynamics in the target system. If a non- linear model has only the slightest SME, then its ability to generate decision-relevant pre- dictions is compromised. Given a perfect model, we can take the effects of SDIC into account by substituting probabilistic predictions for point predictions. This route is fore- closed in the case of SME, which puts us in a worse epistemic situation than SDIC. 1. Introduction. The sensitive dependence on initial conditions ðSDICÞ associated with nonlinear models imposes limitations on the models’ pre- dictive power. These limitations have been widely recognized and exten- Received December 2012; revised June 2013. *To contact the authors, please write to: Roman Frigg, Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method, London School of Economics and Political Science; e-mail: r.p.frigg@lse .ac.uk. Seamus Bradley, Munich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig-Maximilians- Universität München; e-mail: seamus.bradley@lrz.uni-muenchen.de. Hailiang Du, Centre for the Analysis of Time Series, London School of Economics and Political Science; e-mail: h.l.du@lse.ac.uk. Leonard A. Smith, Centre for the Analysis of Time Series, London School of Economics and Political Science; e-mail: lenny@maths.ox.ac.uk. yWork for this article has been supported by the London School of Economics’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy fun