Philosophy Research Seminar

Tuesday 9 September 2008

Reduction and Levels of Reality
Jordi Fernandez & Suzanne Bliss

Abstract

We evaluate the scope of Jaegwon Kim’s ‘causal exclusion’ argument for reduction. Does its conclusion only apply to psychology or does it generalize to all the special sciences? The question of whether reduction generalizes is ambiguous: We distinguish three readings of it. Some of them warrant a positive answer whereas others warrant a negative answer. This ambiguity concerns a hierarchical picture of the world with the domain of physics at the bottom and the domains of the social sciences at the top, which is not precise enough and, nonetheless, it often underlies discussions on reduction and the special sciences.