Reductionism

Does the successful reductionist trend in physical science extend to biological, social, and behavioral science? Ever since Immanuel Kant, antireductionists have insisted that it does not. It was Kant who, we noted above, famously held that the blade of grass will never have its Newton. Properly understood this is a far less question-begging slogan for antireductionism than "the whole is more than the sum of its part." That there will never be a Newton for the blade of grass was meant by Kant to suggest that the kind of explanatory and predictive precision to which physical phenomena submit will never be attained by human cognitive and computational powers. Suppose this claim were true. Would it be enough to reconcile physicalism and antireductionism?

What everyone, reductionist or antireductionist, will grant is that there are many explanations now provided for biological processes which are accepted as appropriate to the contexts in which they are given. That is, there are explanations at various levels of detail for, to take a well-known example, sexual recombination. Some are appropriate to the secondary-school student's context of biological inquiry; some to the university student's background knowledge and ability to understand; and there is a context of inquiry characteristic of the biological specialist, to which a more complicated and more detailed explanation of recombination in terms of the stage and substages of meiosis is appropriate. ~ Page 13/14