Structural problems for reductionism
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Structural problems for reductionism Stephan Leuenberger1
The Author(s) 2019
Abstract Universal reductionism—the sort of project pursued by Carnap in the Aufbau, Lewis in his campaign on behalf of Humean supervenience, Jackson in From Metaphysics to Ethics, and Chalmers in Constructing the World—aims to reduce everything to some specified base, more or less austere as it may be. In this paper, I identify two constraints that a promising strategy to argue for universal reductionism needs to satisfy: the exhaustion constraint and the chaining constraint. As a case study, I then consider Chalmers’ Constructing the World, in which a priori implication, or ‘‘scrutability’’, plays the role of reduction. Chalmers first divides up the total vocabulary of our language into different families, and then argues, for each family separately, that truths involving expressions in that family are scrutable from the putative base. He does not systematically address the question whether ‘‘cross-family sentences’’—sentences involving expressions from more than one family—are scrutable. I shall argue that this lacuna cannot be filled, since scrutability does not allow for the exhaustion constraint and the chaining constraint to be jointly satisfied. I further suggest that Carnap’s account, in which definability plays the role of reduction, has better prospects of meeting these constraints. Keywords Scrutability Supervenience A priori Reduction Chalmers
1 Layer-cake reductionism To reduce everything to an austere base is a familiar philosophical ambition. Such universal reductionism comes in a variety of versions. The desired austerity in the base may be ontological, in the sense of involving few entities or categories of & Stephan Leuenberger [email protected] 1
Philosophy, School of Humanities, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
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entities; conceptual, in the sense of requiring few concepts or families of concepts; or epistemic, in the sense of assuming only modest knowledge claims. I consider the views advocated in Carnap (1928a), Lewis (1986), Jackson (1998), Chalmers (2012), and Chalmers and Jackson (2001) as paradigmatic representatives of universal reductionism.1 Despite their differences, reductionist projects tend to share a certain picture of the world as layered, with the putative base forming the bottom layer. Every nonbasic layer is supposed to be reducible to the ones below it. Moreover, it is a guiding assumption of reductionist picture-thinking that reduction admits of a certain kind of ‘‘chaining’’: layers higher up do not just count as reducible to the ones below them, taken together, but also to the bottom layer all by itself. To illustrate: if the biological reduces to the chemical and the physical together, and the chemical reduces to the physical, then it follows that the biological reduces to the physical alone. Or to vary and expand the example, consider the question whether the realm of colours—the ‘‘chromatic’’—reduces to the physical. A natural strateg
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