Bruno Marchal writes:
>Le 11-mars-06, à 10:59, Georges Quénot wrote (to John):
>
><snip>
>
>
> >
> > Yes also and indeed, the way of thinking I presented
> > fits within a reductionist framework. Nobody is required
> > to adhere to such a framework (and therefore to the way
> > of thinking I presented). If one rejects the reductionist
> > approach, all I can say isn't even worth reading it for
> > him. And, again, all of this is pure speculation.
>
>
>Personally I disagree with any reductionist approach. But, given that I
>agree with many of your statement, perhaps we have a "vocabulary"
>problem.
>I do even believe that a thoroughly "scientific attitude" is
>automatically anti-reductionnist, whatever theories are used. Science,
>being modest, just cannot be reductionist(*).
>Even the numbers are nowadays no more completely reductible to any
>"unifying theory".
>Only pseudo-scientist (or some scientist during the week-end) can be
>reductionist.
I'm afraid I don't understand the version of reductionism to which you so
strongly object. Are you perhaps referring to the mistake of trying to
explain too much with too little? Or are you referring to what Daniel
Dennett has called "greedy reductionism": where something is not so much
explained in terms of what it reduces to as dismissed or explained away,
like saying there is no such thing as mental states because it's all just
neurophysiology? Well, it is "all just neurophysiology", in that the
neurophysiology is necessary and sufficient for the mental states. The
mental states in this sense can be said to reduce to the underlying brain
states. But this is not the same as saying that the mental states therefore
do not exist, or are not important.
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Fri Mar 17 2006 - 00:49:03 PST