Simple Models of Complex Phenomena in the Natural and Social Sciences

There is a hierarchy of types of models of the world: Toy models – Effective Models – and Fundamental Models. A fundamental model is a description of something like the “true” underlying system. Researchers also consider simpler effective models with reduced degrees of freedom and simplified interactions that are nevertheless sufficient to capture the phenomena of interest at the required precision. A third category is the even simpler toy model with captures the essential qualitative phenomena in a solvable and intuitively explainable way. We seek to elucidate the conceptual and methodological purpose of different categories of simple and simplified models within this framework.