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  1. Montague Reduction, Confirmation, and the Syntax-Semantics Relation.Stephan Hartmann & Kristina Liefke - manuscript
    Intertheoretic relations are an important topic in the philosophy of science. However, since their classical discussion by Ernest Nagel, such relations have mostly been restricted to relations between pairs of theories in the natural sciences. In this paper, we present a model of a new type of intertheoretic relation, called 'Montague Reduction', which is assumed in Montague's framework for the analysis and interpretation of natural language syntax. To motivate the adoption of our new model, we show that this model extends (...)
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  2. A Causal Bayes Net Analysis of Glennan’s Mechanistic Account of Higher-Level Causation.Alexander Gebharter - 2022 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (1):185-210.
    One of Stuart Glennan's most prominent contributions to the new mechanist debate consists in his reductive analysis of higher-level causation in terms of mechanisms (Glennan, 1996). In this paper I employ the causal Bayes net framework to reconstruct his analysis. This allows for specifying general assumptions which have to be satis ed to get Glennan's approach working. I show that once these assumptions are in place, they imply (against the background of the causal Bayes net machinery) that higher-level causation indeed (...)
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  3. What is the Point of Reduction in Science?Karen Crowther - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (6):1437-1460.
    The numerous and diverse roles of theory reduction in science have been insufficiently explored in the philosophy literature on reduction. Part of the reason for this has been a lack of attention paid to reduction2 (successional reduction)—although I here argue that this sense of reduction is closer to reduction1 (explanatory reduction) than is commonly recognised, and I use an account of reduction that is neutral between the two. This paper draws attention to the utility—and incredible versatility—of theory reduction. A non-exhaustive (...)
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  4. The Structure and Dynamics Argument against Materialism Revisited.Andrei Mărăşoiu - 2020 - Problemos 98.
    Alter elaborates and defends an ambitious argument advanced by Chalmers against physicalism. As Alter notes, the argument is valid. But I will argue that not all its premises are true. In particular, it is false that all physical truths are purely structural. In denying this, I focus not on the objects of pure physical theory but on the homely, macroscopic objects of our daily lives.
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  5. The Structure of Essentialist Explanations of Necessity.Michael Wallner - 2020 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 9 (1):4-13.
    Fine, Lowe and Hale accept the view that necessity is to be explained by essences: Necessarily p iff, and because, there is some x whose essence ensures that p. Hale, however, believes that this strategy is not universally applicable; he argues that the necessity of essentialist truths cannot itself be explained by once again appealing to essentialist truths. As a consequence, Hale holds that there are basic necessities that cannot be explained. Thus, Hale style essentialism falls short of what Wilsch (...)
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  6. Philosophical Issues Concerning Phase Transitions and Anyons: Emergence, Reduction, and Explanatory Fictions.Elay Shech - 2019 - Erkenntnis 84 (3):585-615.
    Various claims regarding intertheoretic reduction, weak and strong notions of emergence, and explanatory fictions have been made in the context of first-order thermodynamic phase transitions. By appealing to John Norton’s recent distinction between approximation and idealization, I argue that the case study of anyons and fractional statistics, which has received little attention in the philosophy of science literature, is more hospitable to such claims. In doing so, I also identify three novel roles that explanatory fictions fulfill in science. Furthermore, I (...)
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  7. What is Wrong with Self-Grounding?David Mark Kovacs - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (6):1157-1180.
    Many philosophers embrace grounding, supposedly a central notion of metaphysics. Grounding is widely assumed to be irreflexive, but recently a number of authors have questioned this assumption: according to them, it is at least possible that some facts ground themselves. The primary purpose of this paper is to problematize the notion of self-grounding through the theoretical roles usually assigned to grounding. The literature typically characterizes grounding as at least playing two central theoretical roles: a structuring role and an explanatory role. (...)
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  8. Online Overview Article: Reductionism.Jan G. Michel - 2018 - SDA, Digital Humanities Project, Oxford University.
  9. Grounding Orthodoxy and the Layered Conception.Gabriel Oak Rabin - 2018 - In Ricki Leigh Bliss & Graham Priest (eds.), Reality and its Structure: Essays in Fundamentality. Oxford University Press. pp. 37-49.
    Ground offers the hope of vindicating and illuminating an classic philosophical idea: the layered conception, according to which reality is structured by relations of dependence, with physical phenomena on the bottom, upon which chemistry, then biology, and psychology reside. However, ground can only make good on this promise if it is appropriately formally behaved. The paradigm of good formal behavior can be found in the currently dominant grounding orthodoxy, which holds that ground is transitive, antisymmetric, irreflexive, and foundational. However, heretics (...)
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  10. Brute Facts.Elly Vintiadis & Constantinos Mekios (eds.) - 2018 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    Brute facts are facts that don't have explanations. They are instrumental in our attempts to give accounts of other facts or phenomena, and so they play a key role in many philosophers' views about the structure of the world. This volume explores neglected questions about the nature of brute facts and their explanatory role.
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  11. Explanatory Pluralism: An Unrewarding Prediction Error for Free Energy Theorists.Matteo Colombo & Cory Wright - 2017 - Brain and Cognition 112:3–12.
    Courtesy of its free energy formulation, the hierarchical predictive processing theory of the brain (PTB) is often claimed to be a grand unifying theory. To test this claim, we examine a central case: activity of mesocorticolimbic dopaminergic (DA) systems. After reviewing the three most prominent hypotheses of DA activity—the anhedonia, incentive salience, and reward prediction error hypotheses—we conclude that the evidence currently vindicates explanatory pluralism. This vindication implies that the grand unifying claims of advocates of PTB are unwarranted. More generally, (...)
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  12. On the grounding-reduction link.Jonathan Eric Dorsey - 2016 - American Philosophical Quarterly 53 (4):411-22.
    The claim that reduction entails grounding (but not vice versa) – called ‘the grounding-reduction link’ – is potentially very important but not clearly correct. After working through a fruitful debate between Gideon Rosen (who maintains the link) and Paul Audi (who maintains its impossibility), I distinguish between what I call ‘strict’ and ‘broad’ reduction. Strict reduction is incompatible with grounding, but broad reduction is not. Thus the link is possible, at least for broad reduction. However, neither strict nor broad reduction (...)
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  13. The Problem of Secondary Effects.Jeff Engelhardt - 2016 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 54 (2):247-266.
    This paper argues that two principles held by many metaphysicians and philosophers of mind are inconsistent: there is no systematic overdetermination, and some causal effects are also determined by their metaphysical grounds. Call this “The Problem of Secondary Effects.” After introducing the problem and noting philosophical theories that face it, the paper offers further clarification by considering three potential strategies for solving it. All fail. An approach that sacrifices ‘secondary effects’ is briefly sketched as a solution.
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  14. Demystifying Emergence.David Yates - 2016 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 3:809-841.
    Are the special sciences autonomous from physics? Those who say they are need to explain how dependent special science properties could feature in irreducible causal explanations, but that’s no easy task. The demands of a broadly physicalist worldview require that such properties are not only dependent on the physical, but also physically realized. Realized properties are derivative, so it’s natural to suppose that they have derivative causal powers. Correspondingly, philosophical orthodoxy has it that if we want special science properties to (...)
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  15. “Formal” Versus “Empirical” Approaches to Quantum–Classical Reduction.Joshua Rosaler - 2015 - Topoi 34 (2):325-338.
    I distinguish two types of reduction within the context of quantum-classical relations, which I designate “formal” and “empirical”. Formal reduction holds or fails to hold solely by virtue of the mathematical relationship between two theories; it is therefore a two-place, a priori relation between theories. Empirical reduction requires one theory to encompass the range of physical behaviors that are well-modeled in another theory; in a certain sense, it is a three-place, a posteriori relation connecting the theories and the domain of (...)
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  16. Identity, Asymmetry, and the Relevance of Meanings for Models of Reduction.Raphael van Riel - 2013 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (4):747-761.
    Assume that water reduces to H2O. If so water is identical to H2O. At the same time, if water reduces to H2O then H2O does not reduce to water–the reduction relation is asymmetric. This generates a puzzle–if water just is H2O it is hard to see how we can account for the asymmetry of the reduction relation. The paper proposes a solution to this puzzle. It is argued that the reduction predicate generates intensional contexts and that in order to account (...)
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  17. Getting Fundamental About Doing Physics in The Big Bang.Jon Lawhead - 2012 - In Dean Kowalski (ed.), The Big Bang Theory and Philosophy. Blackwell. pp. 99-111.
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  18. Emergence and reduction in Michael Polanyi (II).Daniel Paksi - 2011 - Appraisal 8 (4).
  19. The Causal Autonomy of the Special Sciences.Peter Menzies & Christian List - 2010 - In Cynthia McDonald & Graham McDonald (eds.), Emergence in Mind. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. pp. 108-129.
    The systems studied in the special sciences are often said to be causally autonomous, in the sense that their higher-level properties have causal powers that are independent of the causal powers of their more basic physical properties. This view was espoused by the British emergentists, who claimed that systems achieving a certain level of organizational complexity have distinctive causal powers that emerge from their constituent elements but do not derive from them. More recently, non-reductive physicalists have espoused a similar view (...)
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  20. Emergence and reduction in the philosophy of Michael Polanyi (pt I).Daniel Paski - 2010 - Appraisal 8 (2).
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  21. Identity-Based Reduction and Reductive Explanation.Raphael van Riel - 2010 - Philosophia Naturalis 47 (1-2):183-219.
    In this paper, the relation between identity-based reduction and one specific sort of reductive explanation is considered. The notion of identity-based reduction is spelled out and its role in the reduction debate is sketched. An argument offered by Jaegwon Kim, which is supposed to show that identity-based reduction and reductive explanation are incompatible, is critically examined. From the discussion of this argument, some important consequences about the notion of reduction are pointed out.
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  22. Reduction without reductionism: A defence of Nagel on connectability.Colin Klein - 2009 - Philosophical Quarterly 59 (234):39-53.
    Unlike the overall framework of Ernest Nagel's work on reduction, his theory of intertheoretic connection still has life in it. It handles aptly cases where reduction requires complex representation of a target domain. Abandoning his formulation as too liberal was a mistake. Arguments that it is too liberal at best touch only Nagel's deductivist theory of explanation, not his condition of connectability. Taking this condition seriously gives a powerful view of reduction, but one which requires us to index explanatory power (...)
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  23. The matter of the mind: philosophical essays on psychology, neuroscience, and reduction.Maurice Kenneth Davy Schouten & Huibert Looren de Jong (eds.) - 2007 - Malden, MA: Blackwell.
    The Matter of the Mind addresses and illuminates the relationship between psychology and neuroscience by focusing on the topic of reduction. Written by leading philosophers in the field Discusses recent theorizing in the mind-brain sciences and reviews and weighs the evidence in favour of reductionism against the backdrop of recent important advances within psychology and the neurosciences Collects the latest work on central topics where neuroscience is now making inroads in traditional psychological terrain, such as adaptive behaviour, reward systems, consciousness, (...)
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  24. Is psychological explanation going extinct?Cory Wright - 2007 - In Huib Looren de Jong & Maurice Schouten (eds.), The Matter of the Mind: Philosophical Essays on Psychology, Neuroscience and Reduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
    Psychoneural reductionists sometimes claim that sufficient amounts of lower-level explanatory achievement preclude further contributions from higher-level psychological research. Ostensibly, with nothing left to do, the effect of such preclusion on psychological explanation is extinction. Reductionist arguments for preclusion have recently involved a reorientation within the philosophical foundations of neuroscience---namely, away from the philosophical foundations and toward the neuroscience. In this chapter, I review a successful reductive explanation of an aspect of reward function in terms of dopaminergic operations of the mesocorticolimbic (...)
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  25. Reviewing Reduction in a Preferential Model‐Theoretic Context.Emma Ruttkamp & Johannes Heidema - 2005 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 19 (2):123 – 146.
    In this article, we redefine classical notions of theory reduction in such a way that model-theoretic preferential semantics becomes part of a realist depiction of this aspect of science. We offer a model-theoretic reconstruction of science in which theory succession or reduction is often better - or at a finer level of analysis - interpreted as the result of model succession or reduction. This analysis leads to 'defeasible reduction', defined as follows: The conjunction of the assumptions of a reducing theory (...)
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  26. Coherence, entanglement, and reductionist explanation in quantum physics,".Gregg Jaeger & Sahotra Sarkar - 2003 - In A. Ashtekar (ed.), Revisiting the Foundations of Relativistic Physics. D. Reidel. pp. 523--542.
    The scope and nature of reductionist explanation in quantum physics is analyzed, with special attention being paid to the situation in quantum physics.
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  27. Eliminativist undercurrents in the new wave model of psychoneural reduction.Cory Wright - 2000 - Journal of Mind and Behavior 21 (4):413–436.
    "New wave" reductionism aims at advancing a kind of reduction that is stronger than unilateral dependency of the mental on the physical. It revolves around the idea that reduction between theoretical levels is a matter of degree, and can be laid out on a continuum between a "smooth" pole (theoretical identity) and a "bumpy" pole (extremely revisionary). It also entails that both higher and lower levels of the reductive relationship sustain some degree of explanatory autonomy. The new wave predicts that (...)
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  28. Scientific reduction and the synonymy principle of property identity.Michael Tye - 1981 - Philosophical Studies 40 (2):177 - 185.
  29. Reduction, Time and Reality: Studies in the Philosophy of the Natural Sciences.Richard Healey (ed.) - 1975 - Cambridge University Press.
    The contributors to this 1981 volume are all concerned with scientific realism, but each author questions or rejects aspects of the way it has traditionally been discussed. There are three main foci of attention - reduction, time and modality - and the analyses bring out complexities and difficulties obscured in the standard accounts of scientific realism. The papers are powerful and original, representing some of the best in modern philosophy of science, and each were specifically commissioned for the volume. It (...)
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  30. Interpretations of Life and Mind. Essays around the Problem of Reduction by Marjorie Grene. [REVIEW]Edward Manier - 1973 - Isis 64:248-249.
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  31. Levels of Fundamentality in the Metaphysics of Physics.Karen Crowther - manuscript
    Within physics there are two ways of establishing the relative fundamentality of one theory compared to another, via two senses of reduction: "inter-level" and "intra-level" (Crowther, 2018). The former is standardly recognised as roughly correlating with the chain of ontological dependence (i.e., the phenomena described by theories of macro-physics are typically supposed to be ontologically dependent on the entities/behaviour described by theories of micro-physics), and thus has been of interest to naturalised metaphysics. The latter, though, has not been considered interesting (...)
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