
157
12
What Is This Thing Called Modelling?
I’m no model lady. A model’s just an imitation of the real thing.
Mae West
Before delving into the details of the pricing process and showing how one can produce a
frequency and severity model of losses, it makes sense to pause and ask ourselves what a
model actually is. In attempting to answer that, it is not easy to go much further, in terms of
philosophical depth, than Mae West: ‘A model’s just an imitation of the real thing’. Others have
viewed models as ‘representations’ (Frigg and Hartmann 2012), citing Bohr’s model of the atom
as one such representation, and yet others have referred to them as ‘ ...