Questioning the Justification of Past Science

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

Aristotle (De caelo, 302^a15ff.) put forward a similar definition, but without the associated criterion of decomposition.

Chang quotes Anderson's advocating reductionism in his review of Cartwright's pluralism in A Dappled World: ‘… The workings of our minds and bodies, and of all matter … are assumed to be controlled by the same set of fundamental laws, which … we know pretty well’ (quoted from Anderson 2001, 489 quoting himself from 1972). But this formulation (whatever the intention) does not really claim more than the ubiquity or consistency claim: whatever has mass follows the laws of physics for mass. It allows that particular aspects of the behaviour of certain ponderable matter (brains) cannot be derived from the specified laws of physics and only precludes that such behaviour conflict with these laws.