Reductive Explanation

Supervenience is a relationship which has been used recently to explain the physical determination of biological phenomena despite resistance to reduction (Rosenberg, 1978, 1985; Sober, 1984a). Supervenience, however, is plagued by ambiguities which weaken its explanatory value and obscure some interesting aspects of reduction in biology. Although I suspect that similar considerations affect the use of supervenience in ethics and the philosophy of mind, I don’t intend anything I have to say here to apply outside of the physical and biological cases I consider.The main point of this paper is that there is a property of biological systems which makes it both misleading and inappropriate to reduce central biological phenomena to the properties of underlying components. Despite this, reductive explanation has been a major source of innovation in biological theory. The apparent tension can be resolved if underlying properties are explanatorily relevant to the higher level phenomena even though the latter are not strictly reducible to the former. Supervenience, I will argue, is not robust enough to deny reduction while supporting explanatory relevance.

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Reductive explanation, concepts, and a priori entailment

Philosophical Studies ◽

10.1007/s11098-010-9560-x ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 155 (1) ◽

pp. 99-116 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

E. Diaz-Leon

Keyword(s):

A Priori ◽

Reductive Explanation ◽

A Priori Entailment

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New Perspectives on Reductionism in BiologyMarie I. Kaiser, Reductive Explanation in the Biological Sciences. Cham: Springer (2015), xi+277 pp., $129.00 (cloth).

Philosophy of Science ◽

10.1086/697731 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 85 (3) ◽

pp. 523-529 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Alan C. Love

Keyword(s):

Biological Sciences ◽

Reductive Explanation

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The Modest, or Quantificational, Account of Truth

Studia Philosophica Estonica ◽

10.12697/spe.2008.1.2.01 ◽

2008 ◽

pp. 122-168 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Wolfgang Künne

Keyword(s):

Reductive Explanation ◽

Concept Of Truth

Truth is a stable, epistemically unconstrained property of propositions, and the concept of truth admits of a non-reductive explanation: that, in a nutshell, is the view for which I argued in Conceptions of Truth. In this paper I try to explain that explanation in a more detailed and, hopefully, more perspicuous way than I did in Ch. 6.2 of the book and to defend its use of sentential quantification against some of the criticisms it has has come in for.

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