Reduction epistemological

Griesmeyer, J. R. (2000), Reproduction and the reduction of genetics , in P. Beurton, R. Falk and H.-J. Rheinberger (Eds), The Concept of the Gene in Development and Evolution, Historical and Epistemological Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 240-285. 

A more general approach adopted by many philosophers is called physicalism. This does not entail reduction of the theoretical or epistemological kind but is a question of whether the physical determines the chemical. Physicalism has been invoked in philosophy of mind to argue that there is a dependence relationship between mental events and physical goings on in the brain. This is clearly a weaker form of reductive claim that epistemological reduction discussed earlier in this article. 

Epistemological reduction concerns whether the concepts (properties, natural kinds) necessary for the description of S can be redefined in an extensionaUy equivalent way by the concepts of B and whether the laws governing S can be derived from those of B. 

I ll concentrate on epistemological reduction, because the other two don t make sense without some sort of cognitive connection between the S- and B-domains. The second, more crucial issue is hidden in the phrase "supplemented by suitable supplemen-... 

No strict separation between ontology and ideology, i.e., between things and, properties no strict distinction between ontological, epistemological, and explanatory reduction, and no strict distinction between ontological reduction and conceptual autonomy... 

Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that the epistemological and the theoretical connections between quantum laws and quantum chemical explanations of bonding are far removed from deductive reasoning they are not mere extensions of quantum rules to chemistry. They do not conform to a reductive model for relation between physics and chemistry. 

Scerri McIntyre (1997) make a distinction between ontological and epistemological reduction of chemistry to physics. The authors argue that ontological reduction of chemistry to physics is a foregone conclusion. The question then becomes whether or not chemistry can be reduced to our current descriptions of physics, in other words epistemological reduction of chemistry to physics. 

What is more, in the case of the relationship between chemistry and physics, the claim of ontological reduction is even weaker due to the epistemological irreduc-ibility of the theories of chemistry to the descriptions supplied by physics. In this scenario, the insistence on the ontological dependence of chemical entities and regularities upon the physical domain is not justified the burden of proof lies on the non-pluralist realist. 

Manafu A (2013b) Internal realism and the problem of ontological autonomy a critical note on Lombardi and Labarca. Found Chem 15(2) 225-228 McIntyre L (2007) Emergence and reduction in chemistry ontological or epistemological concepts Synthese 155 337-343... 

In sum, it is difficult to make philosophical sense of the epistemological reduction of one discipline to another. The only cases that can reasonably be discussed, when the area of intended apphcations of one theory is a subset of that of another, are typical issues of scientific debate, for which philosophers have no particular competence to contribute. They do have, however, for investigating conceptual and methodological differences between disciplines, which makes interdisciplinarity issues a much more promising and useful field of philosophical studies than reduction. 

McIntyre L (2007) Emergence and reduction in chemistry ontological or epistemological concepts Synthese 155 337-343... 

Abstract. Four prophetic statements in the introductory paragraph of Dirac s probably most cited paper are analyzed. Not only has his claim been disproved that the quantum mechanical equations needed to solve chemical problems are too complicated to ever be solved, even the reduction of chemistry from quantum mechanics is a tricky epistemological problem. Most surprising is that Dirac believed that relativistic effects are unimportant for chemistry. 

Nevertheless, in his stimulating review, Primas [17] criticizes Dirac as a naive reductionist. According to Primas, Dirac was wrong because his postulate of re-ductionism was based on what Primas calls the pioneer quantum mechanics which he contrasted with modern nonrelativistic quantum mechanics , and that Dirac did not consider the complicated epistemological problems related to the reduction of chemistry from quantum mechanics. It is not the scope of our perspective to comment on this criticism. Note, however, that the two generations of quantum theory differ more in the interpretation than in the operative formalism, that was, in fact, fully formulated in 1929. As to the relevance of problems of interpretation for the application of quantum mechanics, the reader is referred to a refreshing paper by Levy-Leblond [18]. 

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