"John Wilkins"  wrote in message
news:c8114u$2bhf$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
> Perplexed in Peoria  wrote:
>
> > "John Wilkins"  wrote in message
> > news:c7rcpi$kgc$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
> > > What I am asking here is this: If liquidity exists (and I assume it
> > > does) is there any aspect of it that remains uncaptured by a model
> > > composed solely of [representations of] water molecules, and the
> > > attendent atomic and subatomic particles?
> >
> > John,
> >
> > Throw in the four forces of nature.  You can't limit
> > your reduction to just the components - you must also
> > take the interactions between components into account.
> > Change the word "uncaptured" to "uncapturable",
> > since we are not sure the right model is present.
> > No additional changes required.
> >
> > I assent.  There is no aspect that remains uncapturable.
> > I am a reductionist in that sense.  (So, I suspect, is almost
> > every other poster to this group.)
>
> You might be surprised at how many people who use the term "emergence"
> tend to think it means that there is something uncapturable by a
> (theoretically complete) lower-level description.

Do you put yourself in that category?

I'd like to explore this further.  Are the following people committing
a philosophical error?  Do they believe in emergence in the above
sense?
1a. Someone who claims that the final cause of an enzyme is
uncapturable by a theoretically complete lower-level description.
1b. Someone who claims that the material or formal cause of an
infant is uncapturable at lower levels.
2. Someone who admires Coleridge's definition of life as "a whole
that is pre-supposed by all its parts".
3. Ilya Prigogine who claimed in some of his books that Boltzman's
reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics must be
flawed and that the second law must be fundamental or else
a consequence of an unknown fundamental law of nature.
4. Someone who claims that no reductionist explanation of
water's wetness is possible unless you postulate a "fifth force"
which is operative at mid-scale distances.
5. J.S. Mill, who claimed (correctly) that water's properties
could not be reduced to Newtonian mechanics and Maxwell's
electrodynamics.

> > John, I'm sure you have heard the old proverb saying that
> > "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
> > It is frequently cited in engineering circles as a warning
> > to specialists in some technology who seek to utilize their
> > expertise on inappropriate problems.
> >
> > You sir, wield the philosopher's hammer.  As part of your
> > training, you have learned to use this hammer against some
> > Very Bad Ideas that have been suggested by some fairly
> > intelligent people in the past.  These exemplary historical
> > Very Bad Ideas are the nails that you were trained to attack
> > with your hammer.
> >
> > While I very much admire your precision and your reverence
> > for the history of words and ideas, I do occasionally
> > think that you sometimes suspect the existence of nails
> > where none exist.  Just an observation.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> >     Jim  ;-)
>
> Jim, you do me too much honour. I am neither terribly precise nor such a
> good philosopher, but allow me to follow up on an implication of what
> you said here.
>
> I see what I do as a kind of Lockean "clearing the
undergrowth" program
> in the philosophy of science. I don't do science myself, but I pay close
> attention to the ideas and history of science when I consider how
> scientific words are used.
>
> I then try to apply basic logical and categorial precision to the
> present use of words, because words carry connotations (another logical
> term) fromthe past that systematically mislead people. To achieve this,
> I try to charitably interpret the words, and then deal with the
> remainder of contradiction and amphiboly, using logic that Aristotle
> would have recognised.

An admirable program.  My "nail" parable suggests that occasionally you
are less charitable than you should be, though.

> So my question is this: should science be freed from logical coherence
> and consistency?

Of course not.

> Because if that is not a hammer for all nails, I really
> do not know what might be, and that is what you imply.

No, that is what you *read* me as implying.  And that, come to think
of it, was my point.  But, in this case, I don't think that you are
imagining the nail.  You are pretending to imagine it for rhetorical
effect.  Please don't do that.  It is impolite and counterproductive IMO.

> As to the notions of complexity, holism, group properties and the like,
> they

I've lost track here.  What is the antecedent of "they"?  Is it the same
as the antecedent of "them" below?

> follow from simple logical considerations of set theory or
> syllogistic logic (choose your poison - I have a lot of respect for the
> traditional syllogisms), so I think it appropriate to apply them here.
> If you all want me to drop it, I shall.

Don't drop it on my account.

> But I shall continue to think
> contrary claims are mistaken :-)

Sorry, I've lost track again.  Claims contrary to what?
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