Understanding the new reductionism: The metaphysics of science and compositional reduction

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 104, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 193-216

  Gillett, Carl ^a  

^a ILLINOIS WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949382340     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil2007104427     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (31)

1. Kim, "Making Sense of Emergence, " Philosophical Studies, XCV(1999): 3-44, here pp. 12-13.
2. Fodor, "Look! Review of Consilience by E.O. Wilson, " The London Review of Books, XX, 21 (1998): 5-6, here p. 6.
3. See, for example, Kim's Mind in a Physical World (Cambridge: MIT, 1998),
4. and especially his "Making Sense of Emergence." The classicalapproach is laid out in Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (New York:Harcourt Brace, 1961).
5. There are obviously both intralevel and interlevel mechanisms andmechanistic explanations, but here the reader should note that I will primarilybe focused upon the latter. For accounts of mechanistic explanation, see, amongothers, Fodor, Psychological Explanation (New York: Random House, 1968);
6. William Wimsatt, "Reductive Explanation: A Functional Account, "in R. Cohen et al., eds., PSA Proceedings 1974 (Boston: Reidel, 1974);
7. Robert Cummins, The Nature of Psychological Explanation (Cambridge: MIT, 1975);
8. William Bechtel and Robert Richardson, Discovering Complexity (Chicago:University Press, 1993),
9. and P. Machamer, L. Darden, and C. Craver, "Thinking about Mechanisms, " Philosophy of Science, LXVII (2000): 1-25.
10. See, for example, Putnam, "Psychological Predicates, " in W.H.Capitan and D.D. Merrill, eds., Art, Mind, and Religion (Pittsburgh: University Press, 1967), pp. 37-48;
11. Fodor, Psychological Explanation,
12. and "Special Sciences, " Synthese, XXVIII (1974): 97-115;
13. Wimsatt, "Reductionism, Levels of Organization and the Mind-Body Problem, " in Gordon Globus, Irwin Savodnik, and Grover Maxwell, eds., Consciousness and the Brain (New York: Plenum, 1976), pp. 199-267;
14. and Kitcher, "1953 and All That, " Philosophical Review, XCIII(1984): 335-73.
15. See my "Non-Reductive Realization and Non-Reductive Identity, "in Sven Walter and Heinz-Dieter Heckmann, eds., Physicalism and Mental Causation(Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic, 2003), pp. 31-58;
16. "Strong Emergence as a Defense of Non-Reductive Physicalism, "Principia, VI (2003): 83-114;
17. and "Samuel Alexander's Emergentism, " Synthese, CLIII (2006):261-96.
18. Shoemaker, "Causality and Properties, " in Peter van Inwagen, ed., Time and Cause (Boston: Reidel, 1980), pp. 109-36.
19. I have argued in detail elsewhere that once we look at real, concretelydescribed cases of scientific composition we have strong reasons to rejectstructural properties and analogous entities. See my "Why a Naturalistic Diet Is Good for Your (Philosophical) Health" in Brian McLaughlin and Julie Yoo, eds., New Essays on Realization (forthcoming).
20. The reader should mark that elsewhere I have criticized the so-called"subset" or "Flat" view of realization (in "The Dimensions of Realization, " Analysis, LXII (2001): 316-23), as well as awide range of other accounts of "making-up" and "composition" in the sciences (in "Why a Naturalistic Diet..."), for failing to accommodate the characteristics of scientific composition, particularly the qualitative distinctness of its relata.
21. See my "Why a Naturalistic Diet...." Two basic problems recurin securing identities even when we have a unique realization base. First, thediffering modal, and other, features of higher- and lower-level scientificentities preclude even "restricted" identities in such cases. And, second, as we noted above, the core characteristics of scientific compositionrelations contrast sharply with the features of identity relations, whether"restricted" or not, to ensure that we do not usually get identitieseven when we have unique realization. Such points are bolstered by the ratherdifferent critique of such identities offered by Mark Johnston in "Manifest Kinds, " this JOURNAL, XCIV, 11 (November 1998): 564-83.
22. See, for example, the papers in Kim's Supervenience and Mind (New York:Cambridge, 1993), but even Kim's later Mind in a Physical World continues thefocus on supervenience.
23. It is important to note that, if they exist at all, our commitments tothe "structural, " or "micro-based, " properties feted both by Kim, in Mind in a Physical World, and Derk Pereboom, in his "Robust Nonreductive Materialism, " this JOURNAL, XCVIII, 10 (October 2002):499-531, are also consequently reduced by compositional reduction. For if suchstructural properties exist at all, then the sciences make it clear that theirpowers plausibly noncausally result from the powers of the fundamentalmicrophysical properties, such as the spin, charm, and charge of quarks.Consequently, such structural properties are plausibly realized properties andhence an Argument from Composition also applies to them.
24. Barry Loewer's "Why Is There Anything Except Physics? "(unpublished),
25. Trenton Merricks's Objects and Persons (New York: Oxford, 2001);
26. and van Inwagen's Material Beings (Ithaca: Cornell, 1990), amongstothers. The machinery of these writers potentially provides a resource for thecompositional reductionist, so long as she is careful about the rather differentcommitments of these writers on a range of issues.
27. See, for example, Frank Keil, Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development(Cambridge: MIT, 1992).
28. New York: Pantheon, 1994.
29. New York: Basic Books, 2005.
30. See, for example, Anderson, "More Is Different, " Science, CLXXVII (1972): 393-96.
31. Kauffman, At Home in the Universe (New York: Oxford, 1995).