Is Physics Ontologically Basic?

Last week, I attended a talk by a fellow contributor to this blog -- I don't think it's good to identify her or him since I want to discuss a view I only heard.  I may easily have misunderstood the view, and the view I state may or may not be the same as a view that has been published by the speaker, or may distort what the speaker wanted to make of it.

So let's call the speaker X: if X reads this and wants to correct me with or without self-identification, so much the better.

X argued against the "reductionist" idea that some sciences are more basic than others.

1.  All scientific theories are representations of reality, and as such they are incomplete since any representation leaves out something.

2.  Let R1 and R2 be distinct representations of reality, neither of which is translatable into the other (e.g., by bridge principles).  Suppose further that there is no representation R3, such that R1 and R2 are both translatable into R3.  Under such circumstances, there is no basis for saying that R1 is more basic than R2, or vice versa.

3.  Since there are no bridge principles, any two sciences (e.g., physics and chemistry; neuroscience and psychology; ecology and biology) are like R1 and R2 above.

4.  Therefore, no science is more basic than any other.  Any two sciences are different incomplete representations of reality -- each gets at features of reality that the other leaves out.

Now, it seems to me that this is a good argument for many conclusions.  For example, it is a good argument for the autonomy of chemistry, psychology, ecology and so on.  Of course, this depends on establishing premise 3 for the particular case -- but let's just grant that this can be done.

Now in the discussion of X's paper, some people urged the following sort of "objection" -- it isn't really an objection; more like an independent point.  They said: Look, let's grant the above argument, but couldn't it still be the case that the reality that physics investigates is ontologically prior to the reality that chemistry investigates? -- perhaps in the sense that chemistry-facts are supervenient on physics-facts, or that chemistry-facts are just physics-facts under certain combinations, or something of the sort.

X's reply, or at least the reply I thought I heard was this: well, I agree that chemistry-entities are made up out of physics-entities, but because there are no bridge principles, the supervenience claim cannot be true.  After all, there is no science in which it is true.

I am unsatisfied by this.  I am inclined to think that IF chemistry-entities are made up out of physics-entities, then supervenience holds.  (I don't want to put too much emphasis on supervenience: the claim that every chemistry-fact is a physics-fact is good enough for me -- some "ontological" claim of this sort.)

Now, the supervenience (or inclusion) claim may be of no interest to the chemist, since s/he has autonomous methods of investigating the domain.  Further, it may be of no interest to the physicist, since it is messy and, moreover, reveals very little of interest concerning the physics-domain.  It may even be the case that there is no effective way of stating the supervenience relation.  But this does not imply that the supervenience claim is false.

What's wrong with my intuition?

CfP: Workshop on Reduction and Emergence

Emergence and Reduction in the Sciences (Second Pittsburgh-Paris Workshop)

Friday, December 11- Saturday, December 12, 2009 at the Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh

Center for Philosophy of Science and Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh / Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques, Paris.

The theme of the conference, emergence and reduction in the sciences, reflects the interest that these dual notions continue to attract in philosophy of science, most notably in philosophy of physics, of biology and of cognitive science. The organizers invite papers that address these dual notions in any science. Papers that connect the notions in several sciences are encouraged.

Contributors are asked to send: Paper title, abstract (500 words) and a short CV in a single pdf file to the EasyChair conference page at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=pp2 by the submission deadline. (If you are not already a registered user of www.easychair.org, you will need to create a free account as part of the submission process.) Deadline for submission: August 15; Notification of acceptance: September 15. For general inquiries, cweber23@pitt.edu. Supplementary funding may be available to provide partial support for speakers contributing papers.

Invited speakers:

Jacques Dubucs, Philippe Huneman; IHPST, Paris

Peter Machamer, Sandra Mitchell, Kenneth Schaffner; HPS, Pittsburgh

Michael Silberstein, Philosophy, Elizabethtown College

Jessica Wilson, Philosophy, University of Toronto

Reduction Then and Now

As Eric Schliesser explains in his recent post and comments, the old Unity of Science project is dead. That project had two main aims. One of these was to reduce the substantive claims of all science to those of physics. For instance, biology was to be shown to arise from biochemistry, biochemistry in turn from physics. In order to achieve this, the terms of the “special sciences” had to be reduced to those of physics: gene to DNA segment to some physical term. In short: all causal claims were to be reduced to claims about the entities of physics, and the special sciences themselves are reduced to sets of existential claims about certain combinations of the entities of physics.

This project died with the autonomy of science movement. Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, and Philip Kitcher all argued that the claims of the special sciences did not depend in any way on the reduction to physics, and that the causal claims of these sciences could hold independently of their physical realization. For instance, Mendel’s Laws depend only on the independent segregation and recombination of genes, and their underlying structure is unimportant. This meant that the original unreduced meaning of the term gene was indispensable to biology, and the whole reduction process described above is nugatory.

In recent years, we have seen two rather controversial developments in this area – and because of the weakness of general philosophy of science they have not been properly scrutinized from the perspective of scientific methodology.

The first development is autonomy gone ontological. One example occurs in philosophy of biology where it has been claimed that natural selection and drift are “population level causes” in the sense that they act on populations in a way that has nothing to do with causes that act on individual organisms. This goes much further than the claim that populations (cp genes) are constituted by structural features that are indifferent to particular realizations. This is an extreme application of the autonomy arguments.

The second development is ontology being pushed deeper than physics. In the 1920s, Bertrand Russell argued that the terms of physics are functional: mass is nothing but resistance to acceleration; charge, once again, is to be understood interactionally. He asked what intrinsic properties of matter underlay these functional terms. Russell proposed a “neutral monism” in answer to this question, on which the fundamental properties of matter were the stuff of consciousness.

Recently, this proposal has been revived by David Chalmers and Daniel Stoljar, who suggest that the fundamental and intrinsic properties of matter are “protophenomenal”. Consciousness arises out of these deep properties of matter, as do the interactional properties described by physics. This seems like a radical application of the old Unity assumptions.

Both these developments beg for the critical discourse of general philosophers of science. C’mon girls and guys: where are you? Are these uses of Unity/Disunity of science maxims legitimate?