Chapter 21. Learning from Experience

1 The use of a model has a value in restoring a sense of the concrete to an investigation which may have lost contact with its background through abstraction and the theoretical deductive systems associated with it. Its merit in this respect is matched by its merit as a primitive approach to abstraction in that a whole experience, say feeding, is being used as a model for a later problem. The defect of the model as an instrument adds force to the need to produce abstractions.

2 A model has also qualities which enable it to fulfil some of the functions of an abstraction. It enables the investigator to use an emotional experience by applying it as a totality to a subsequent experience or to some aspect of it. These merits carry in themselves the elements that finally make the model outdated. No experience exactly matches a past experience; the scientific deductive system and its abstractions, or the model and its associated images, can only be an approximation to the realization and vice versa.

3 I distinguish between the model and the abstraction by reserving the term model for a construction in which concrete images are combined with each other; the link between concrete images often gives the effect of a narrative implying that some elements in the narrative are the causes of others. It is constructed with elements from the individual's past, whereas the abstraction is, as it were, impregnated with preconceptions of the individual's future.1 Its similarity with the model lies in its origin in an emotional experience and its application to a fresh emotional experience; its dissimilarity lies in the gain in flexibility and applicability which is obtained by loss of particular concrete images; the elements in the abstraction are not combined

by narrative but by a method intended to reveal the relationship rather than the objects related. The deductive system abstracts from an emotional experience those qualities that display the relationship between