Abstract

Ernest Nagel provides a set of non-formal requirements for reductionism which, I argue, can be interpreted as a statement on how the compositional complexity that assumes an interconnectedness between scientific disciplines works as a cognitive strategy for how we view the world. I adopt an alternative reductionism that does acknowledge the spirit of the classical Nagelian view by shifting attention away from the formal emphasis on the derivation of theories as such-conceived as bodies of linguistic items to a more methodological role which I claim reductionism plays as part and parcel of those cognitive heuristics with which scientists intervene in the world. My reductionism, therefore, is more methodological than theoretical in that we, as cognizers, see the world compositionally and we seek to understand complex systems in terms of their component parts and their interactions. A recurring issue in the philosophy of science concerns the reduction of what are uncontroversially higher-level properties/phenomena to lower-level properties-physico-chemical properties and their interactions. The classical view centers on the reduction of theories constitutive of higher-level disciplines to lower-level theories. Reduction here is conceived in terms of the derivation of higher-level laws from more basic, physical laws utilizing principles which, the classicist claims, close the gap between the meanings of constituent terms making up the higher and lower-level disciplines. The classical view has been subject to wide scale criticism. The criticism, I argue, embodies a collection of theses all purporting to establish the failure of the classical view. This criticism, however, reflects a certain bias on what reductionism, according to the critics, must entail. I argue that though the anti-reductionist critique creates a straw man version of the classical view, a straw man argument which itself is the result of the way in which Nagel presents the formal conditions necessary for reductions to be had, it ignores the spirit that motivated the classical position to begin with