Arman Prangere

Modeling involves abstracting features from reality to reveal patterns and regularities. This simplification is heuristically powerful but carries conceptual risks. One is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, where models are mistaken for reality; another is the fallacy of expected completeness, where models are criticized for failing to capture features they were never meant to represent. I explore these risks through a study case of W. Ross Ashby’s cybernetic conception of purposive behavior, which formalizes biological purpose as systemic stability. While his framework highlights general principles of adaptation, it risks blurring nuances of scale, temporality, and subjectivity. I argue that this formalist tension, between a demand for detail that renders analysis intractable and an overly parsimonious ontology that distorts its object, can best be clarified through Bruno Latour’s notion of modes of existence. By recognizing a pluralistic ontology, we preserve the heuristic power of modeling while avoiding both the temptation to overinterpret models’ ontological claims (misplaced concreteness) and the tendency to overextend our evaluative demands on them (expected completeness). These insights are directly relevant to debates in contemporary cognitive science, where the balance between abstraction and lived experience remains central. Thesis : Modeling life inevitably involves abstraction. Philosophical conflict arises not from abstraction itself, but from confusing epistemic practices with ontological claims (misplaced concreteness), or from demanding that abstractions recover what they must necessarily omit (expected completeness). Ashby’s cybernetic exemplifies this structural tension that still underlies disputes in philosophy of mind. Latour’s ontology helps resolving it.