Reduction

Abstract

There is heated debate at the moment among philosophers of science over the concepts of reduction and inter-theoretic explanation in the physical sciences. The emphasis put by some philosophers, in particular by NAGEL (1961), on the preservation of the entailment relations in a reduction situation has been contested by FEYERABEND (1962), and by many others since then. The storm would somewhat abate if in the physical sciences a distinction were made and kept between a logical and more or less formal notion of reduction, construed as a content- or meaning-preserving relation between theories, and a less easily circumscribed notion of inter-theoretic explanation, construed as a relation between theories following which the content of the “reducing” theory serves to elucidate the reasons why the content of the “reduced” theory is not in fact realized.