Meeting 11: The Reduction/Anti-Reduction Debate (4/1)

Reading:

• S&D Chapters 6–7: “Mendel and Molecules”, “Reduction: For and Against” **
• Sarkar, “Reduction: A Philosophical Analysis” [PDF]
• Kitcher, “1953 and All That: A Tale of Two-Sciences” [CIEB §13]
• Waters, “Why the Antireductionist Consensus Won’t Survive the Case of Mendelian Genetics” [CIEB §14]
• Sober, “The Multiple Realizability Argument Against Reductionism” [CIEB §15] *

Presentation:
Troy | Zoe commenting

Sterelny and Griffiths provide an excellent introduction to the main issues surrounding the reductionist anti-reductionist debate. We can get into this debate by noting the obvious fact that there are a number of different scientific theories (some coming under the heading of an umbrella theory, like biology, perhaps). How do all these different theories relate? Sometimes this relation seems quite unproblematic. Newtonian mechanics simply replaced Galilean mechanics; their relation is that one is closer to the truth than the other and that’s it. But there are also many theories which have a more questionable relationship. We'll focus on the test case of Mendelian genetics and it's relationship to modern molecular biology. Is the latter reducible to the former? What precisely does (or might) that mean? For that matter, is biology an autonomous science or can it all be reduced to physics? Is all science, as Ernest Rutherford put it, “either physics or stamp collecting”?

A terminological note for the Kitcher paper: it uses an older symbolic logic notation that you might not be familiar with. On p. 265, principle (*) reads: ‘(x)(x is a gene <—> Mx)’. This is to be read (in “quasi-English”) as ‘For all x, x is a gene if and only if Mx’. In other words: ‘All genes are Ms, and vice versa’, where ‘Mx’ is an “open sentence”, which basically means a complex predicate — something that can be said of something.

What is going on on page 266? All that’s happening is one direction of (*) — confusingly listed there as (2) — is being used to replace every mention of genes (Gx, Gy) with their molecular equivalents (Mx, My). Don’t worry about it if it’s still obscure. . . . The basic idea is just that (*) and (2) are being used as “bridge principles” for replacing the predicates of classical genetics with those of molecular.