Against reduction |
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Authors: | James Maclaurin |
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Institution: | (1) University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand |
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Abstract: | In Molecular Models: Philosophical Papers on Molecular Biology, Sahotra Sarkar presents a historical and philosophical analysis of four important themes in philosophy of science that have
been influenced by discoveries in molecular biology. These are: reduction, function, information and directed mutation. I
argue that there is an important difference between the cases of function and information and the more complex case of scientific
reduction. In the former cases it makes sense to taxonomise important variations in scientific and philosophical usage of
the terms “function” and “information”. However, the variety of usage of “reduction” across scientific disciplines (and across
philosophy of science) makes such taxonomy inappropriate. Sarkar presents reduction as a set of facts about the world that
science has discovered, but the facts in question are remarkably disparate; variously semantic, epistemic and ontological.
I argue that the more natural conclusion of Sarkar’s analysis is eliminativism about reduction as a scientific concept. |
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Keywords: | |
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