… working through the logical implications of our assumptions

What’s the purpose of mathematical modeling? « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

Scientists — not just in epidemiology, but in physics, ecology, climatology, economics and every other field — don’t build models as oracles of the future. For them, a model “is just a way of understanding a particular process or a particular question we’re interested in,” Kucharski said, “and working through the logical implications of our assumptions.”