Reductive explanation

From Nineteenth Century Ideas on Reduction in Physiology to Non-Reductive Explanations in Twentieth-Century Biochemistry... 

Macdonald, G. T. (1992), Reduction and evolutionary biology , in D. Charles and K. Lennon (Eds), Reduction, Explanation and Realism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 69-96. 

Marc Van Regenmortel It may be appropriate to distinguish between reductive explanations, the cornerstone of reduction, and the possibility of achieving understanding by reduction rather than in a holistic or contextual... 

Returning to my original fanciful example, the first thing to note is that reductive explanations may fail to be relevant or appropriate even when they do introduce factors that are at least preconditions for the phenomenon in question. (Perhaps there is always some kind of reductive explanation that does this much.) This possibility is obvious for evolutionary psychology. To take an extreme (in the absurdity of the evolutionary explanation) and notorious example, there is no doubt that men have evolved both the capacity to commit rape, and a disposition, under some circumstances, to do so. This much is true for any behaviour that actually occurs, although the disposition to play the sousaphone or to extract cube roots is something that requires extremely special circumstances. 

Dupre, J. (1998), Against reductive explanations of human behaviour, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 72 (Supplementary), 153-171. 

One possible approach to the resolution of this dilemma might be termed the way of the shaman one dispenses with all attempts at reductionist analysis and simply accepts the experience on its own terms, perhaps as a divine revelation from a source outside the self—a god within a plant, for instance. Indeed, the psychedelic experience is so profound and overwhelming that even scientifically sophisticated individuals can easily succumb to the misperception that the trip is in the drug. The alternative response, which might be characterized as the way of the alchemist, is to become utterly obsessional in the seeking of reductive explanations, and to construct wildly elaborate models in an attempt to integrate the irreducible reality of what is experienced into some scientific or, more often, quasi-scientific paradigm. This book tries, unsuccessfully perhaps, to steer a middle course between these two approaches. 

Ramsey, Jeffrey L. 1997a. "Molecular Shape, Reduction, Explanation and Approximate Concepts." Synthese, 111 233-251. 

As Wimsatt (1996) puts it "a reductive explanation of a behaviour or a property of a system is one showing it to be mechanically explicable in terms of the properties of and interactions among the parts of the system." See also Humphreys (1996). 

Nagel, E. 1974. "Issues in the logic of reducting explanations." In Teleology Revisited (pp. 95-113). New York Columbia University Press. 

And yet, a theology comfortable with explanatory pluralism will still encourage all the sciences to push their own purely natural, and inevitably reductive, explanations as far as possible at their own appropriate levels of investigation. Good... 

Smith, P. 1992. Modest Reductions and the Unity of Science. In Charles, D. and Lennon, K. (eds.), Reduction, Explanation, and Realism. Oxford Clarendon, 19-43. 

In this chapter we have argued that chemistry education needs to be reconceptualised to incorporate salient themes from the emerging field of philosophy of chemistry. We have outlined an example framework for the application of philosophy of chemistry in chemistry education. In particular we have presented reduction, explanation, laws and supervenience as critical... 

What is required for an explanation to be considered a reductive explanation ... 

R) The explanatory premises of a reductive explanation of a phenomenon involving property F (e.g. an explanation of why F is instantiated on this occasion) must not refer to F (Kim 2005 105). 

Not only must the explanans of a reductive explanation of F not refer to F, but it also must not refer to any other property at the level of F - or, equivalently, a reductive explanation of F may refer in its explanans only to properties at levels lower than that of F (Kim 2005 106)... 

Thus, we have good reason to think that both mental properties and many scientific properties will be context dependent and therefore resist functional definitions and functional reductions. The kind of trivial fimctional definition Kim gives for the concept of a gene is easy to come by. But this definition and reductive explanation does little explaining or illuminating, and we could easily find trivial fimctional definitions for... 

Since the narrow physical realizer of a C-type event is surely a part or constituent of that C-type event, then the reductive explanation of the regularity would not meet the definition of being undercutting for it would not entail that, in the case of every instance of the regularity not even a part or constituent of the C-type event token in each instance was a cause of the E-type event token in that instance. (2003, p. 160)... 

As I mentioned, Kim, Lewis, Chalmers, and Jackson all have a rather diflferent picture of theoretical identity than the one sketched here. Focusing on Kim, as I explained earlier Kim sees the role of identities as really a matter of specifying a realizer of the functional role of a mental state rather than capturing the metaphysical nature of a mental state. And this difference reflects a view of reductive explanation in which the role of reduction of, say, water, is not to find the physical ground of water but rather a matter of finding what plays the water role here and now. 

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