Attribute-Identities in Microreductions

Causey, Robert L.

doi:10.2307/2024853

Cited by 70 publications

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“…54 What follows will bring it into question. The main motivation for regarding reduction functions as synthetic seems to arise from the realization that identifying appropriate reduction functions requires empirical work, sometimes experimentation of 52 See, e.g., Causey (1972aCausey ( , b, 1975)dsee Klein (2009) for a response that is consistent with the aims of this paper. 53 Needham ( the highest caliber.…”

Section: Connectabilitymentioning

confidence: 91%

Nagel on reduction11For discussions, in some cases over many decades, thanks are due to Jordi Cat, Alan Love, Ken Schaffner, Abner Shimony, John Stachel, and Bill Wimsatt. Comments by participants of the Formal Epistemology and the Legacy of Logical Empiricism Workshop (University of Texas, Austin, Spring 2013) and the audience at a Philosophy Department seminar at the University of Sydney were also useful. For comments on previous drafts, thanks are due to Justin Garson and Thomas Uebel.

Sarkar

2015

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A

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Section: Connectabilitymentioning

confidence: 91%

Nagel on reduction11For discussions, in some cases over many decades, thanks are due to Jordi Cat, Alan Love, Ken Schaffner, Abner Shimony, John Stachel, and Bill Wimsatt. Comments by participants of the Formal Epistemology and the Legacy of Logical Empiricism Workshop (University of Texas, Austin, Spring 2013) and the audience at a Philosophy Department seminar at the University of Sydney were also useful. For comments on previous drafts, thanks are due to Justin Garson and Thomas Uebel.

Sarkar

2015

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A

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“…I want to focus on what Kim calls the identity of properties, which he thinks should be the result of reduction that Nagalian bridge law equivalences are too weak to capture. The idea that bridge law equivalences express mere correlations between predications which should be strengthened to identities in order to give the explanation we expect of a reduction seems to go back to Causey (1972). But this something which Causey claims would convert a DN explanans into one really sufficient for explanation remains obscure in his paper because he fails to give a sufficient condition stronger than coextensiveness which would tell us what property identity amounts to.…”

Section: Kim On Reductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Reduction and emergence: a critique of Kim

Needham

2008

Philos Stud

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In a recent critique of the doctrine of emergentism championed by its classic advocates up to C. D. Broad, Jaegwon Kim (Philosophical Studies 63:31-47, 1999) challenges their view about its applicability to the sciences and proposes a new account of how the opposing notion of reduction should be understood. Kim is critical of the classic conception advanced by Nagel and uses his new account in his criticism of emergentism. I question his claims about the successful reduction achieved in the sciences and argue that his new account has not improved on Nagel's and that the critique of emergentism he bases on it is question-begging in important respects.

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“…However, later writers have considered such biconditionals too weak, insisting that in cases of genuine theory reduction bridge principles need to involve strict identities, not mere correlations, between the phenomena described by T s and T p (e.g. Schaffner 1967;Sklar 1967;Causey 1972;Fodor 1974Fodor /1994Bhargava 1992). That is to say, the bridge principles should express both "token-token" and "type-type" identities.…”

Section: Conditions For Theory Reductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why the social sciences are irreducible

Wahlberg

2017

Synthese

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It is often claimed that the social sciences cannot be reduced to a lowerlevel individualistic science. The standard argument for this position (usually labelled explanatory holism) is the Fodorian multiple realizability argument. Its defenders endorse token-token(s) identities between "higher-level" social objects and pluralities/sums of "lower-level" individuals (a position traditionally called ontological individualism), but they maintain that the properties expressed by social science predicates are often multiply realizable, entailing that type-type identities between social and individualistic properties are ruled out. In this paper I argue that the multiple realizability argument for explanatory holism is unsound. The social sciences are indeed irreducible, but the principled reason for this is that the required token-token(s) identifications cannot in general be carried through. In consequence, paradigmatic social science predicates cannot be taken to apply to the objects quantified over in the lowerlevel sciences. The result is that typical social science predicates cannot even be held to be co-extensive with individualistic predicates, which means type-type identifications are ruled out too. Multiple realizability has nothing to do with this failure of co-extensiveness, because the relevant social science predicates are not multiply realized in the sense intended by the explanatory holists, a sense which presupposes reductive token-token(s) identifications.

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Attribute-Identities in Microreductions

Cited by 70 publications

References 0 publications

Reduction and emergence: a critique of Kim

Why the social sciences are irreducible

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