Reduction, Hierarchies and Organicism

Abstract

Discussions of the philosophical issues of reduction, holism, emergence, inter-level explanation, organicism, neovitalism—in other words, of the relations between levels of organisation (both in hierarchically arranged objects such as organisms and in hierarchically arranged sciences)—are always conducted in a context of insufficiently clarified ideas. And not only are they insufficiently clarified; they are ideas whose connections involve the most fundamental controversies of metaphysics, the theory of knowledge, and the philosophy of science. This means that when we look at the details of some reasonably definite question, such as ‘What is micro-reduction?’ or ‘Is the structure of a living organism reducible to the principles of physics and chemistry?’, we find that the ideas we need are located at the nodes of a ravelled background web. We are almost tempted to see something in the old idealistic view that the solution or clarification of one question involves the solution or clarification of all.