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Sometimes I think my career suffers from a kind of split personality disorder. For instance, as a scientist I tend to point out to my colleagues in philosophy that to say “that’s an empirical question” is a good thing, not a conversation stopper. Then again, I also find myself reminding my science colleagues that no matter how hard they try to ignore it, everything they do has philosophical underpinnings, including in terms of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.
Or consider the fact that I often argue, again with my science colleagues, that scientism—an attitude of pretty much unquestionable worship of science—is not a good thing. I ever co-edited a book about it! And yet, I turn around and I find myself accused of, you guessed it, scientism!, by a number of my philosophy colleagues (not to mention creationists, mysticists, and other assorted pseudo-thinkers).
I try to console myself that I must be doing something right if I manage to piss off both sides of frequently acrimonious debates, but I don’t know, maybe I’m just engaging in rationalizing wishful thinking.
Lately I’ve been able to add a third issue about which I seem to behave like an epistemic version of Schrödinger’s cat: I may or may not agree with a given position, until someone asks and then I settle down on a specific state. That issue is reductionism.
My dictionary defines reductionism as: “the practice of analyzing and describing a complex phenomenon in terms of phenomena that are held to represent a simpler or more fundamental level, especially when this is said to provide a sufficient explanation.”
Once again, as in the cases described above, sometimes I argue against reductionism, and sometimes in favor. Let me explain.
During much of my career as an evolutionary biologist I have been on record as an anti-reductionist. Specifically, I have been involved for decades in debates against colleagues who thought that the genetic-molecular level of analysis is the fundamental one in biology, and that everything else, from cell behaviors to ecosystem functioning, ultimately reduces to the properties of the molecules of inheritance. One of my major targets throughout that period has been Richard Dawkins, to give you just one name.
To be fair, Dawkins was relatively small potatoes compared with another one of my recurrent targets: Nobel winner physicist Steven Weinberg, who kept insisting that in principle everything in the world could be explained in terms of quantum mechanics. At a conference we attended together (Dawkins was there too!) I kept asking: exactly what principle? I never got an answer.
To my surprise, and definitely not delight, of late I’ve been increasingly accused of being a reductionist! How dare people hurling such an insult to me? Haven’t they read anything I’ve written over the last three decades?? Then again, the accusation came from a number of individuals belonging to the ever more widespread category of fuzzy thinkers, including a number of supporters of pseudoscience and even pseudophilosophy, like the current undisputed champion of panpsychism, Philip Goff.
At this point I better explain myself and try to convince you that one can coherently be both in favor and against reductionism, depending on what we mean by that term and under what circumstances we apply it.
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