Re: models - branch fromf GM discussion

[Tim Gwinn <***>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ROSEN Forum []]On Behalf Of John
> Kineman
> Sent: Monday, May 10, 2004 7:50 PM
> Subject: Re: models - branch fromf GM discussion
>
>
> Hi John M.,
>
> You are pointing out that we can mean different things by
> reduction(ism). Certainly that is true.
>
> Rosen, I believe, discussed it in terms of explaining a system in terms
> of its components, i.e., reducing everything the system does to its
> parts and not attributing any causes to its organization.  Since that
> view - that the organization comes from the parts - is essentially the
> mechanical view of nature, Newtonian, etc., that's what I meant by
> "physical reduction:" referring to the common way the term has been
> used/connoted.  An example (from Blackburn Dictionary of Philosophy) is
> "reducing biology to chemistry, supposing that no distinctive biological
> facts exist, or chemistry to physics, supposing that no distinctive
> chemical facts exist." Clearly RR believed that certain distinctive
> facts exist in biology that are not represented in physics.
>
> However, the broader and more technical definition is simply explanation
> of one thing in terms of something else. Again from Blackburn:
> "reductionism (reductivism) A redutionist holds that the facts or
> entities apparently needed to make true the statements of some area of
> discourse are dispensable in favor of some other facts or entities."
> Hence there is a sense where the use of any kind of model is a
> reduction, for working purposes.
>
> Those were the two usages I was referring to -- our own personal
> definitions may be equally interesting, but the "confusion" I was
> referring to is that most people, most scientists anyway, will relate to
> reduction in the physical sense, i.e., as "reductionism," as defined by
> Blackburn, reducing biology to chemistry and physics, and it is that
> sense that RR seemed most opposed to. In the broader sense, however,
> where any model is a kind of reduction, even Rosen theory cannot escape
> it - it is still a way of thinking about nature, i.e., a surrogate for
> nature, but it is not reduction to physics.
>
> For more fun and grins, one can point out another confusion - that
> saying RR theory is not a reduction to physics is incompatible with the
> statement that RR theory implies "new physics" because in the latter
> case we are again saying that what is new would be captured by the
> supposedly improved physics.

JohnK,

 

I know this is not a serious complaint you are making here, but it brings up a good point. I don't think there is an incompatibility, but a difference in terminology. There are two senses to the term 'physics' involved here. One is 'physics' as an ideal program to describe all of material reality in a class of logico-mathematical images (models). The other is 'physics' as it is currently conceived and practiced - that is: "contemporary physics" which rests on a Newtonian paradigm.  From Life Itself (p. 34-35):

    "As already noted, it has been the prevailing sentiment in science today, as it has been for centuries past, that physics is the general, and hence, biology is the particular. In the present section I will try to clarify what this assertion means.

    In some ideal sense, of course, this assertion about physics is trivially true. Ideally, the aspiration of physics, its dream, is to encompass material nature in all its manifestations.  Organisms, as part of material nature, clearly fall within this compass. Hence, from such an ideal perspective, biology indeed becomes part of the physical whole.

    But I am not, in fact, addressing this ultimate ideal. When I use the word "physics," I am talking about contemporary physics; physics as it exists now, today, embodied concretely in all the books and journals reposing in the physics sections of all the libraries of the world. It is a very different matter to suppose, as reductionism requires, that biology is a particularization or specialization of contemporary physics." [bold added]

So, "new physics" means transcending contemporary physics (which is essentially a set of syntactic axioms driven by the state-recursion rule implicit in the Newtonian paradigm). Doing so will take us beyond the artefactual limitations of description of contemporary (state-based) physics. But, that also takes us outside of the confines of a "constructivist universe". As such, although we would then have at hand an enriched class of logico-mathematical models of material reality, I think it also becomes open to question whether it would ever be possible to fully describe - even from within this enriched "physics" - biological organisms.

Regards,

Tim