Reconstruction Failures: Questioning Level Design.

In front of unsuccessful models and simulations, we suggest that reductionist and emergentist attitudes may make it harder to detect ill-conceived modeling ontology and subsequent epistemological dead-ends. We argue that some high-level phenomena just cannot be explained and reconstructed from unsufficiently informative lower levels. This eventually requires a fundamental viewpoint change in not only low-level dynamics but also in the design of low-level objects themselves, considering distinct levels of description as just distinct observations on a single process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]