The virtues of nonreduction, even when reduction is a virtue

Philosophical Forum

Volumn 34, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 121-140

  Jones, Todd ^a  

^a NONE

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Indexed keywords

EID: 2142776185     PISSN: 0031806X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9191.00130     Document Type: Article

References (8)

1. Thomas Nagel, "Reductionism and Antireductionism," The Limits of Reductionism in Biology, ed. Gregory R. Bock and Jamie A. Goode (New York: Wiley, 1998): p. 3
2. Jaegwan Kim, Mind in a Physical World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998): p. 89
3. Patricia Churchland, Neurophilosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986): p. 278
4. Carl Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1966)
5. Such broad general categories are often said to be "multiply realizable". Much has been written about the special qualities of multiply realizable (MR) concepts, even though multiple realizability has never been very well defined in the philosophical literature (see Lawrence Shapiro, "Multiple Realizations," Journal of Philosophy 97 (2000): 635-54
6. The most written about feature of multiple realizability is that MR concepts are often thought to be irreducible (see Hilary Putnam, "Philosophy and Our Mental Life," in his Mind, Language, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975)
7. Jerry Fodor, "Special Sciences," in The Philosophy of Science, ed. Richard Boyd, Philip Gaser and J. D. Trout (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993) 429-42. I argue in a forthcoming paper that MR concepts are just as reducible as any other. Less-stringent MR concepts, however, will reduce to very broad physically defined classes. Physical definability, knowing the broad physical features shared by members of a category, thus, need not mean an agent has very specific information about things described by the concept
8. This claim seems to run counter to claims made by some psycholinguists that complex terms can sometimes be learned or understood more quickly than more simply defined terms. But this is not the case. First, I am only making the relatively weak claim that having a shorter definition is one way a concept could be acquired more quickly. Second, while science might provide us with determinate definitions for our intuitive concepts, that does not mean that most of our concepts are represented in our heads as definitions. Indeed, there is much evidence that they are not (see Jerry Fodor, Concepts [Oxford: Clarendon, 1998]). But my claim in the text concerns the comparative ease of learning concepts when they are represented via defining features. Third, my claim is about the comparative ease of learning simple versus complex concepts "all other things equal." But all other things may not be equal for certain concepts. We might learn certain complex concepts more easily because these concepts contain numerous features that are intrinsically interesting to creatures like us. We might even have certain complex concepts "hard-wired" in us innately. This is all consistent with simpler concepts being easier to acquire, "other things equal."