Phi 272 F06, reading guide

Reading guide for Thurs. 11/30 and Tues. 12/5: Alex Rosenberg, Reductionism in a Historical Science, Philosophy of Science, vol. 68 (2001), pp. 135-163 (on JSTOR )

The first part of Rosenberg’s paper (i.e., §§1-3) is primarily critical of the application to biology of traditional views of theoretical reduction (including the one you’ve seen in Carnap) and is also critical of arguments against reduction. In the second part, Rosenberg sets out his views, which turn out to be a form of reductionism that he takes to be suited to biology. His discussion throughout turns on the interplay between evolutionary theory and molecular biology that he takes to be central to the character of contemporary biology.

• In preparing for Thursdays class, you should focus on the specific problems Rosenberg sees biology as posing for both reductionism in its traditional form and anti-reductionism. Which seem the most important? In his discussion of anti-reductionism, he has a good deal to say about various views of explanation, and some of this discussion will be important for the second part of the paper. Most of what you need to know about these views will be clear from what he says, but I’ve provided a guide to some of the terminology below.

• For next Tuesday, think about the sort of reductionism Rosenberg proposes and how you and others might respond to it. The best route into this may be to focus on the ideas of “how-possibly” and “why-necessary” explanations (see pp. 151-152), the examples of them he sees in biology, and the relation between them he suggests (see especially pp. 153-154

Some terminology. Rosenberg uses some Latin terminology for parts of an explanation: the explanans (pl. explanatia) is what does the explaining and the explanadum (pl. explanada) is what is explained. The D-N (or deductive-nomological) account is essentially what you saw in Carnap: an explanation involves deduction from a law. The “unification” view also focuses on kinds of arguments (ones which serve to unify science) but does not require laws. Laws ceteris paribus are laws “other things being equal,” or, roughly, laws that hold normally. Rosenberg also uses some logical notation. The sign ∨ stands for “or” so a list of terms joined by the sign is a list of alternatives; as is this, the rest of his notation is pretty much the same as that used by Carnap in his ch. 1 except that Rosenberg uses → where Carnap used ⊃.