Reductionist philosophy

[Howard Pattee <***>]

Tim,

I think you're missing Jack's point. We all get hyperbolic when
irritated.

Jack wrote:
> I think it more than a *tad* unfair that this tribe 
> paints reductionist thinking as a kind of cancer.

Tim responded: Where has anyone painted reductionist thinking as a kind
of cancer?

HP: Jack is expressing a feeling of irritation. He is not alone. I think
what Rosen says about physicists and biologists as reductionists (in LI,
not AS) is more than a tad unfair. My point is that I think we should
ignore these comments rather that promote them on this list, because in
my opinion Rosen's hyperbolic criticisms of physics and biology in Life
Itself came from his own irritation at the academic establishment at
Buffalo and Halifax. And believe me, he had plenty of reasons to be
irritated at both. 

To wit: In the Preface of LI Rosen attributes blanket reductionist views
to both physicists and biologists. He calls Rutherford a reductionist and
contrasts him with anti-reductionist Hutchins (both noted for their
hyperbolic quips) and concludes, ".  .  . they cannot both
be right."  Why not? Based on another quip of Rutherford's,
Rosen's attributes reductionism to physics in these words:  . 
.  . "there is no other science than physics; everything
else we call science is ultimately a special case of physics" [LI,
p. 3]. What contemporary scientist believes that?

He also attributes reductionism to molecular biologists in the following
words: "But above all, the machine metaphor (supported of course by
the corpus of modern physics) is what drives, and justifies, the
reductionism so characteristic of modern biology" [LI p. 21].

What's irritating about the phrase "reductionist model" is its
false implication that you can tell a modeler's metaphysics from the
model itself. This is not the case. Just because particle physicists
study quarks and gluons and molecular biologists study the base sequences
of genes and protein folding does not mean they are reductionists. You
can't study just relational biology. Relations are only defined between
things. Modeling things does not mean you are a reductionist. 

Many postings on this list have apparently taken their cue from Life
Itself and misuse the phrase "reductionist model" dismissively
referring to physical and biological models. Reductionism is not a
property of a model! Reductionism is a relation between two or
more models. Rosen uses reductionism as the general metaphysical belief
that all models are formally derivable from, or reducible to, what Rosen
calls a "largest model." This "hard" reductionism is
often associated with Laplacean determinism that assumes everything can
in principle be predicted and explained by basic laws of physics. This is
no longer considered a reasonable view. As a matter of fact, it is hard
to find a modern "hard" reductionist, although a few still
exist. (I will provide references if anyone doubts this.)  

There are many other more benign usages of "reductionism."
Sometimes just the belief that every system obeys physical laws is called
reductionism. In this sense, and based on all the evidence, physicists
and almost all scientists are "soft" reductionists. They
believe every system obeys in principle fundamental physical laws; but
soft reductionism does not claim that all higher models are formally
derivable from physics. They do not believe there is a "largest
model" in Rosen's sense. Even the basic physical models themselves
are not reductionist.

There are many beautiful physics and biological models out there that
answer questions that are interesting and important. If they satisfy the
modeling relation, it is irrelevant whether they can be fit into a
reductionist metaphysics or not.  

Howard