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Reductive Explanation: A Functional Account

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

William C. Wimsatt
William C. Wimsatt*
Affiliation:
Dept. of Philosophy, The University of Chicago
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Extract

Philosophical discussions of reduction seem at odds or unsettled on a number of questions:

  1. (i) Is it a relation between real or between reconstructed theories, and if the latter, how much reconstruction is appropriate? Or is reduction best construed as a relation between theories at all?

  2. (ii) Is it primarily connected with theory succession, with theoretical explanation, or with both?

  3. (iii) Is translatability in principle sufficient, or must we have the translations in hand, and if the former, how do we judge the possibility of translation when we don’t have one?

  4. (iv) What is the point of defending the formal model of reduction if it doesn’t actually happen (Hull, Ruse), or if the defense has the consequence that if reductions occur, they are trivial and uninformative (Hull), or merely incidental consequences of the purposeful activity of the scientist qua scientist in devising explanations (Schaffner)?

Type
Symposium: History and Philosophy of Biology
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1974 , 1974 , pp. 671 - 710
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland

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Footnotes

*

The major portion of this paper was written while I was a visiting research fellow in Humanities, Science, and Technology at Cornell University. I wish to thank the program and especially Max Black and Stuart Brown for their support.

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