Reductionism physical

As to the general issue of reduction, chemists would do well to consider the work of philosophers of science, who have for some time renounced the notion that any particular branch of science may be strictly reduced to a more basic science. The classic work giving conditions for strict reduction is by Nagel (53), and several detailed criticisms of his views have been published (54, 55). More recently there appears to be a partial return to reductionism under the guise of supervenience . Chemistry is said to supervene over physics even though it cannot be shown to be strictly reducible in the sense of Nagel. Whether supervenience represents merely a hope and whether it holds any explanatory power is the focus of much current work in philosophy (56-58). 

Sohotra Sarkar I never thought I would ever be in a position to defend Dennett, particularly Darwin s Dangerous Idea book, but I do think you are being unfair to him. I mean, what he did mean by bland reductionism primarily is some kind of physicalism that nobody is going to deny, and that s all he meant by that. And then what you are presenting here as definitions are statements he makes, and those are not things that he calls definitions. 

Alex Rosenberg That s a critical question because there are at least some defenders of emergentism and anti-reductionism who have distinguished sharply between causation as an ontological phenomena and explanation as epistemological and say that though physicalism is true, that is, we are nothing but matter and motion, nevertheless, the best explanations of our behaviour will not be physical. Bob ... 

If reductionism is to be given a chance of being right, we must give it natural selection as at least a component of the reduction base of biology in physical science. 

Alex Rosenberg I plead guilty to this oversimplification of the intellectual landscape. And I plead guilty because with the exception of the present company, perhaps, it seems to me that in the philosophy of biology the consensus view is physicalist antireductionism. We re all physicalists now, but as a methodology reductionism won t work. Now, evidently you, among perhaps some others, reject physicalism. 

John Dupre Wait. But you are grabbing the term physicalism for something that implies reductionism in principle or something like that. I don t think that s by any means a consensus,... 

However, one should nevertheless resist the temptation to dub this as a triumph of physical reductionism for at least two reasons ... 

Bob Williams As a scientist I would say, that as far as reductionism is concerned, we could think how far physics has got. Now physicists would say that given the Big Bang at a tenth of minus fiftieth of a second, they can come all the way forward to the present time as far as most dead things are concerned, and they ve achieved that conclusion over a very long period of time. I don t know how far this reductionist game will go as far as living things are concerned. What I worry about is, if I am not allowed to say that all the scientific activity is in some way reductionist, what does holistic research mean. What is it exactly If somebody could answer what is holistic research, I would be very interested. 

Le Poidevin explains that combinatorialism is a form of reductionism about possibilia. He claims that the talk of non-existent possibilia is made true by virtue of actual objects and their properties, just as the inhabitants of model world mentioned above is made possible by virtue of a and b and the properties F and G. Presumably the reader is being invited to also consider such examples as Mendeleev s predicted elements in this way. According to le Poidevin s approach, the elements that are as yet non-existent but physically possible are those that can be regarded as combinations of some undefined basic objects and/or basic properties. 

There is no doubt that reductionism to more basic physical levels... 

Foremost in the analysis of the authors who deal with theoretical and quantum chemistry is the physical reductionism of chemistry seen from the perspectives of the chemists involved, and the competitive evolution of research schools in the various political systems of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Germany at mid-century. In his introduction, Nikos Psarros from a philosoph-... 

In this paper we discuss a number of issues which manifest the theoretical particularity of quantum chemistry and which are usually not discussed in an explicit manner either in the historical or in the philosophical studies related to quantum chemistry. We shall focus on five issues the re-thinking of the problem of reductionism, the discourse of quantum chemistry as a confluence of the traditions of physics, chemistry, and mathematics, the role of textbooks in consolidating this discourse, the ontological status of resonance, and the more general problem of the status of the chemical bond. Finally, we shall briefly discuss the impact of large scale computing. 

---