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Materialism: Metaphysics and Methodology

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Materialism: Metaphysics and Methodology MATERIALISM: METAPHYSICS AND METHODOLOGY by ADAM JOHN CONSTABARIS B.A., The University of British Columbia, 1993 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of Philosophy) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA August 1995 © Adam John Constabaris, 1995 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of T^'toSe pK^ The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Date DE-6 (2/88) 11 Abstract In contemporary discussions of materialism, the term "reductionism" is used in several senses. First, I distinguish materialism, the metaphysical claim that "everything is physical" from physicalism, which is, broadly speaking, a research strategy that gives some sort of privilege to physics. I discuss two theses commonly associated with materialism, the view that the natural world is divided into levels corresponding to the various special sciences, and the claim that physics is "causally complete". In the second chapter, I discuss reductionism in the sense in which that term applies to empiricists who espoused a doctrine known as "the Unity of Science". Ametaphysical empiricists were less concerned with the classical materialist goal of ontological economy than they were with conceptual economy, establishing a single theory stated in the language of physics which would be adequate for all scientific purposes. According to various empiricists, such unity was to be achieved by explaining higher level theories in terms of lower level theories, a phenomenon known as intertheoretic reduction. I then show how the most widely discussed account of intertheoretic reduction as a kind of derivation is related to empiricistic views on the nature of theories and of explanation. I discuss the reasons that the empiricist's linguistic account of reductionism was re-formulated by metaphysically minded philosophers as the claim that every property is a physical property (property reductionism). Then I discuss the "multiple realizability" arguments, which are widely thought to establish both the methodological autonomy of the special sciences from physics and the metaphysical thesis that there are non-physical properties. I argue that the conclusion of such arguments is better stated as a Ul conclusion about the representational power of physical language. Next, I state the recent arguments that 'non-reductive' forms of materialism based on supervenience (conceived as a relation between physical and non-physical properties) appear to be compatible with non• standard emergentist versions of materialism, and suggest that a more linguistic construal of supervenience ought to be employed in the formulation of materialism. In the final chapter, I attempt to show the independence of reductionist methodological claims from the metaphysical claim of property reductionism. iv ABSTRACT ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi CHAPTER ONE: MATERIALISM 1 Definitions and (some) Presuppositions 3 Materialism: The Nuts and Bolts 6 Levels of Nature 9 The Closure of Physics 14 CHAPTER TWO: REDUCTIONISM 19 Introduction 19 Intertheoretic Reduction and Logical Empiricism 22 A Formal Model of Reduction 25 Theory and Ontology 28 The Functionalist Challenge 31 CHAPTER THREE: SUPERVENIENCE AND EMERGENCE 37 Supervenience Materialism: The Consensus View 37 Supervenience • 40 Emergence 44 Why Supervenience? 48 A proposal 50 V CHAPTER FOUR: REDUCTIONISM REVISITED 52 A Brief Science Lesson 53 Property Reduction Again 55 Methodological Reductionism 58 Conclusion 61 BIBLIOGRAPHY 62 vi Acknowledgements I would like to thank Steven Savitt for making me worry about many of the ideas I intially wanted to put into this thesis (as well as a lot of ideas I did put into it), Alan Richardson for illuminating and entertaining discussions of logical empiricism, and Leslie Burkholder for bibliographical assistance. 1 Chapter One: Materialism The history of philosophy is littered with examples where ontology and epistemology have been stirred together into a confused and confusing brew (Earman 1986, p.7) Physicalism, goes the standard story, comes in two basic flavors: reductive, and non- reductive. Reductive physicalism, or "reductionism" for short, is often associated with logical positivism and is widely regarded as hopeless. Non-reductivists typically argue that it is possible to retain the ontological and metaphysical portions of physicalism while rejecting the positivists' epistemological cum methodological doctrine of "the Unity of Science". Curiously, although their central goal is to establish the methodological autonomy of the special sciences from physics, anti-"reductionists" usually attempt to refute a metaphysical thesis. This curious situation is compounded further by the charge that the most popular form of non-reductive physicalism — supervenience physicalism ~ bears a close relation to emergentism, a doctrine which is at odds with orthodox physicalism. My aim in this thesis is to disentangle the methodological thesis of reductionism from the metaphysical thesis of reductionism. I take non-reductive physicalism to be based on the view that the metaphysical monism of physicalism does not imply the sort of linguistic or epistemological monism associated with the classical doctrine of "the Unity of Science" (Carnap 1933, Oppenheim and Putnam 1958). I am in substantial agreement with non-reductivists that materialism (the metaphysical thesis of physicalism) has no such implications. I do think, however, that non-reductivists have failed to distinguish clearly between ontology on the one hand and epistemology on the other, leading to a number of confusions about reductionism. The objects, properties, and processes described in the 2 vocabularies of the various special sciences may all be "physical" objects, properties, and processes, but this does not mean that the special sciences are or ought to be physics, as the classical reductionist seems to tell us. We can, in a phrase, be metaphysical reductionists without being epistemological reductionists. However, the failure of classical reductionism does not, contra Fodor (1974) imply the disunity of science (Smith 1992). Anti-reductionist arguments are, at least nominally, usually directed at the largely static account of intertheoretic reduction given by Ernest Nagel (1961, ch. 11). More recent dynamic accounts of reduction (Wimsatt 1976, Hooker 1981) which respect (to a certain degree) the autonomy of the special sciences have been by and large ignored. Such accounts of reduction support a modified view of the unity of science. I will not argue directly for such unity, but only show how it is possible to defend 'weak' unity against some popular antireductionist arguments. Non-reductive physicalists often employ the notion of supervenience in their formulations of physicalism; roughly, the idea behind supervenience physicalism is "no difference without a physical difference". Supervenience is supposed to capture the idea that the physical facts determine all of the facts without implying that the special sciences are reducible to physics. While supervenience seems to be on the right track (if taken as a metaphysical claim, which it usually is), several philosophers (Kim 1992, 1993, Horgan 1993a) have noticed the resemblance supervenience physicalism bears to a doctrinal tradition Brian McLaughlin (1992) has called "British Emergentism" (e.g: Broad 1925). Emergentists accept that everything is composed out of microscopic physical particles and that no two things can differ in any respect unless they differ in some physical respect, but 3 deny the key physicalist claim that physics is 'causally complete' . In light of the resemblance between emergent materialism and supervenience materialism (and other historically embarassing ones), Horgan argues, the would-be non-reductivist must require that the supervenience relation itself be given a 'materialistically acceptable' explanation (1993a). This seems to represent a step back towards reductionism, since the core notion of reduction is the explanation of one theory by another. Definitions and (some) Presuppositions In this thesis, I will be looking at physicalism from the point of view of a philosopher of science. The basic problem to which physicalism is a response is quite simple (Melnyk 1993): physics is not the only successful science; whatever reasons we have for accepting the claims of physicists as true (or empirically adequate, or reliable predictive instruments) about what the world is like apply to at least the more successful "special sciences", including large chunks of chemistry, biology, geology, and psychology. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the various sciences do fit together in some way — total "incommensurability" between (for example) cytology and physics is out of the question1. Physicalism is a story about the way some things 'hang together', to borrow Sellars' (1963) famous phrase. Sellars himself noted that there is no single scientific image (and I have
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