(c) Explain the observed functionality/phenomenology of entities in those categories by understanding their structure and internal operation. (b) Identify likely categories of entities. Thus the traditional scientific agenda can be described as follows. To understand something, take it apart and see how it works. In most other realms of science, however, petty reductionism still holds sway. Weinberg’s characterization of petty reductionism was the “doctrine that things behave the way they do because of the properties of their constituents.” Recall that Weinberg said that petty reductionism has “run its course” because when it comes to primitive particles it isn’t always clear what is a constituent of what. A reductive analysis of a Game-of-Life Turing Machine can explain how a Turning Machine may be implemented, but it doesn’t help us understand the laws governing the functionality that the Turing Machine provides. Our example was the implementation of a Turing Machine on a Game of Life platform. In the first paper, we argued that grand reductionism doesn’t hold. Grand reductionism is the claim that all scientific laws can be derived from the laws of physics. Our definitions of entities says they are real.Īs we discussed in (1) Weinberg distinguished between what he called petty and grand reductionism. The question Shalizi raises is do his higher level variables refer to anything real or are they just definitional consequences of lower level variables. Throwing away the entity is the reductionism blind spot.
When one eliminates the entities as a result of reductionism one loses information.
14Entities, functionality, and the reductionist blind spot
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