Is Antireductionism a scientific position?

Question

I read in Wikipedia:

Antireductionism is a philosophical and scientific position that ...

It seems to me that Antireductionism cannot be a scientific position as it is in direct conflict with physics which is a part of science(?). Physics makes predictions about things as if they were made of quantum particles. So, if everything is made of quantum particles(?), then the laws of Quantum Field Theory or String Theory would predict something (probabilities) about the future state of the universe given its current state. If this prediction is true(?), then everything is explained by one frame of thinking (Quantum), and there is no need for other "planes" of explanations.

Since so many great philosophers have held/are holding this position, I must have made a mistake in reasoning. So, can somebody please explain this aspect of Antireductionism to me?

NOTE: The parts of the reasoning that seem a possible suspect to me are marked by (?).

Answer 1

Antireductionism is a scientific position, it fits the mathematical results encountered in places like chaotic dynamics. However much you simplify an explanation, if there are feedback loops and other interactions involved, you cannot actually foresee the real outcome of the simplified system at certain levels of detail. So even if you have given a most basic set of principles, you are going to fail to predict complex behavior.

In that sense, reducing the problem does not solve it. You still need other methods and measures that capture the behavior at other levels, and they may be of far more use than an underlying explanatory mechanism. So science cannot proceed entirely through reduction, it needs to be multiple-layered and the more complex multiple realizations need to be maintained as a part of the science even if they are explained by more basic behavior.

There is no contradiction here even within physics. We make use of both statistical mechanics and the flow theory of heat. We make use of both models of proton bonding and the pH notion of acidity, we admit that turbulence requires an entire extra layer of principles in addition to the basic theory of fluids to allow any kind of useful prediction, etc. etc. etc. The higher-level observations both verify the underlying theory and make it more usable. And they demonstrate interesting subtleties we would miss if we focused entirely on root causes. Downward is not always the best direction to look.

And there is often a good reason to look askance at a reductivist agenda. In fields like biology and geology, more reductivist approaches routinely misled exploration until the relevant reducing elements were introduced from outside (DNA came from chemistry), or came together naturally (Subduction as the source of plate tectonics came out of 30 years of attempts to put together data from three different warring subdisciplines).

Worse yet, there are sciences where reductivism has, to date, done only harm: dwelling too closely on the methods of physics has always done harm to more complex sciences like psychology. It draws them to solidify underlying principles before they have an adequate survey of the actual field. It makes them pursue narrow, closed experiments that fail to capture meaningful data. We end up with Freud before Rogers, and Reich before Linehan, and we spend all of our time discussing nonsense.

Answer 2

The mistake is to see explantory layers as incompatible or competing.

In evolution theory, it has been understood for a long time that the gene is the fundamental level of selection, and kin-selection theories and of group selection coming to dominate over individual selection have been dismissed. But what is now increasingly accepted, is that evolution occurs on the level of the gene and other levels https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection#Multilevel_selection_theory (increasing numbers of studies are demonstrating this happens in practice, whatever Dawkins says).

Emergence in physics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence can be seen as analogous. A level of ordering and complexity occurs in addition to the 'fundamental' one, that is not independantly or in contradiction to it, but requiring an additional explanatory layer for clear understanding. It is like computer code that runs independentally to the particular computer, because it involves structure/s which self-reinforce or interact as assemblies.

Entropy doesn't exist at the scale of individual particles. Yet for assemblies of particles it gives arguably (by Einstein) the strongest laws we have. Hawking was able to use the process of analogy to 'reverse engineer' the temperature of black holes (which showed they produce Hawking Radiation) and so, that they have entropy solving the apparent violation of the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox This is even though we think a black hole is a 'particle', lacking internal structure.

Antireductionist, or more conventionally holistic or systems thinking is proving increasingly important in many sciences. Substance dualism (like Descartes') is contrasted with materialism, and has been apparently neccessary to explain qualia. But property dualism, specifically in the form of emergent materialism, reconciles qualia as an explanatory layer. Yes in a very complex way it is still just particles. But just as it is simpler, more elegant, more computable, to deal with modelling a 'program' instead of calculating every transistor (and that ignores transistors can be replaced with all kinds of other switches inc quantum superpositions), so we have 'supervening' organisational states, like cells, minds, and subjective experiences, far more effectively dealt with in their own explanatory layers, even though fundamentally 'reducible'. Like entropy can be pictured as a 'cause', even though it is only statistically valid, so minds and their states be causes, even though they are also 'just' fluctuations of atoms.

Answer 3

A couple points:

1. It's not clear what a scientific position is. So let's replace 'position' with 'theory' so that the discussion is clearer.
2. Requiring that a scientific theory not contradict any other scientific theory is definitely not a criterion of science. If it were, we would be in really bad shape. New theories always contradict those they replace. This is how science progresses.
3. Furthermore, I would suggest the following principle: If X is a scientific theory or hypothesis, then it's antithesis (~X) is also a scientific theory or hypothesis. Note that I'm not saying that they are both equally good. I'm just saying it doesn't make sense to say that claim $X$ is scientific, but ~X is not scientific. This principle is especially important in consideration of the percentage of scientific theories that have turned out to be wrong.

Answer 4

I think that some people would prefer if antireductionism was a scientific position. Then they could account for irreducible things without denying materialism.

Others (including Stephen Jay Gould and his "non-overlapping magesteria" and Karl Popper) are perfectly happy to think that science is reductionistic, because they acknowledge the irreducible things to be true but not known to science.

People who have problems with science and reduction are those who idealize science as reductionistic and also assert that science is the only reliable source of truth claims.

BTW: I changed the claim in Wikipedia to be less broad... now it reads "Antireductionism is the position in science and metaphysics that stands in contrast to reductionism (anti-holism) by advocating that..."

Clearly, antireductionism is a position in science one can take on interpreting a dataset or experimental result. But now Wikipedia is not asserting that science is antireductionistic.

Answer 5

To see where antireductionism has value consider the natural numbers (that is, positive integers) where one does not need antireductionism because of the presence of unique factorization. Given a natural number there exists, although it may be impossible to find within the finite age of the universe, a unique analysis of that number into its prime factors. That analysis reduces the natural number to those factors. The synthesis occurs through multiplication which unambiguously brings us right back to the original number.

If reality were so easy to analyze and synthesize as factoring a natural number, that is, if reductionism were true, there would be little doubt that the reality that we are part of would be just as deterministic as mathematics.

The antireductionist position has epistemological and ontological components. The epistemological component is like the problem of not being able, within the lifetime of the universe, of actually factoring most natural numbers. The ontological component is totally unlike the situation with the natural numbers. That claims that we cannot reduce everything to something else, say a quantum reality. It is like saying that there exist some natural numbers that we cannot, even in principle, factor.

Is there anything in reality that might suggest ontological antireductionism is true? The article suggests one can find examples supporting antireductionism in areas such as cybernetics, systems theory, history and economics.

Now to answer paraphrases of the questions:

Can antireductionism be a scientific position?

To say antireductionism is not a scientific position would be to say there exists a demarcation between what is science and what isn’t. Perhaps antireductionism is a kind of pseudoscience? One of the proponents of finding a demarcation to separate science from pseudoscience is Karl Popper. According to the antireductionism wikipedia article, Popper “was a famous proponent of antireductionism” in his book Of Clouds and Clocks: An Approach to the Problem of Rationality and the Freedom of Man. So, not all ways to demarcate the boundary between science and pseudoscience reject antireductionism.

If everything is made of quantum particles can’t we use this one framework to explain everything?

A reductionist might answer yes. An antireductionist would more likely answer no. If the reductionist is correct, reality may be like the natural numbers. We are part of reality, so there would be a reductionist explanation for everything we do. That would suggest superdeterminism were true and everything is determined. That would include, according to John Bell, “the 'decision' by the experimenter to carry out one set of measurements rather than another”. So if that reductionist view is correct the reductionist needs to find a way to avoid superdeterminism or give up science itself.

There is a comment asking "What is eliminativism?"

A reductionist position attempts to analyze something into its components and hopes that such analysis can replace what one started with. For example, 6 can be analyzed into the factors 2 and 3. An eliminativist position would say that there is no need to bother reducing something. It is illusory. Succeeding at such an argument is to say that something does not exist. It would be like saying we do not have to bother factoring the imaginary number i in the natural numbers because i does not exist in the natural numbers. Believing it does is an illusion.