with which they were initialized. However, the worry that Simons and Boschetti raise should be interpreted as going deeper than this. While we generally assume that the world described by CGCMs is deterministic at the scale of interest--one past state of the climate determines one and only one future state of the climate--CGCMs themselves don’t seem to work this way. In the dynamics of the models, past states underdetermine future states. We might worry that this indicates that the non-physicality that worried Sen Gupta et. al. runs deeper than flux couplers: there’s a fundamental disconnect between the dynamics of computational models and the dynamics of the systems they’re purportedly modeling. Should this give comfort to the proponent of DMS?
6.4.3 Tools for Deciding
This is a problem only if we interpret computational models in general--and CGCMs in particular--as designed to generate positive and specific predictions about the future of the systems they’re modeling. Given what we’ve seen so far about the place of CGCMs in the broader context of climate science, it may be more reasonable to see them as more than representational approximations of the global climate, or even as simple prediction generating machines. While the purpose of science in general is (as we saw in Chapter One) to generate predictions in how the world will change over time, the contribution of individual models and theories need not be so simple.
The sort of skeptical arguments we discussed in Section 6.4.2 can’t even get off the ground if we see CGCMs (and similar high-level computational models) not as isolated prediction-generating tools, but rather tools of a different sort: contextually-embedded tools
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