-----Original Message-----Tim,
From: ROSEN Forum [mailto:***On Behalf Of Howard Pattee
Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2005 11:00 AM
To: ***
Subject: Reductionist philosophy
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