Abstract
The assumption of the causal closure of the fundamental level of reality has been used to support reductionism and undermine non-reductive views such as Davidson’s anomalous monism. Jaegwon Kim, in particular, devoted numerous papers to this line of critique, arguing that the stratification of reality into distinct levels is incompatible with the causal closure assumption. Taking issue with Kim’s position, my chapter seeks to show that the stratified picture is both safe and useful from the scientific point of view. The defense of non-reductive physicalism requires a clear distinction between levels of reality and levels of description, a distinction that counter-arguments (such as Kim’s) tend to blur.
In Memory of Margie Morrison
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Notes
- 1.
I heard the term ‘flat physicalism’ for the first time in the 2019 conference on which this volume is based, but the position is one that Shenker and Hemmo have been defending for at least a decade. For their recent writings on the subject see their “Why Functionalism is a Form of ‘Token Dualism’” in this volume, their “A Dilemma for Davidson’s Anomalous Monism” http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/19563, and their (forthcoming) “Flat Physicalism”.
- 2.
I defend Davidson’s version of nonreductive physicalism, which is the version that comes under Kim’s attack. I believe, however, that my defense applies, mutatis mutandis, to other versions.
- 3.
In what follows I draw on my book on causation (Ben-Menahem, 2018), but my focus here is different, resulting in a different organization and of the arguments.
- 4.
This point is implied by Hempel’s account of explanation and stressed by Davidson in “Causal relations” (1980a), where he distinguishes causal relations, which are not sensitive to the description of the related events, from explanatory statements, which are. See also Steiner (1983), who credits Sydney Morgenbesser with the same insight.
- 5.
This formulation may not be faithful to the letter of Nagel’s account, but is consonant with its sprit. Note that I am only discussing what Nagel (1961, p. 342) refers to as “heterogeneous reduction.” As Nickles (1973) observed, there is an opposite usage of the notion of reduction, common among physicists, on which it is the fundamental theory that is reduced to the higher-level theory, meaning that the former converges on the latter in the limit. Thus, one might say that special relativity reduces to Newtonian mechanics at velocities much lower than that of light (v≪ c). I will use ‘reduction’ in the philosophers’ sense, which is more apt for discussing the problems that concern us here.
- 6.
In this passage I ignore the current debate on the success of the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics; See Hemmo and Shenker 2012 and the literature they cite. The reducibility of the concept of entropy is discussed in section III.
- 7.
- 8.
The asymmetry is manifest in the second law’s proclaiming that (very roughly), in an isolated system, entropy can spontaneously increase but not decrease)
- 9.
This special character of entropy, as a result of which it is not directly measurable, has led to the extreme position that it is not a physical quantity. I do not share this position but cannot argue this point here. Present day writers emphasize that using the Lebesgue measure for probability (or for entropy) in this context is not the only possibility and is therefore a non-trivial, albeit intuitive, assumption. See, for example, Hemmo and Shenker (2012b), Pitowsky (2012).
- 10.
The standard formalism that captures this relation between microstates and macrostates is the representation of the former by points, and the latter by regions, in the 6 N dimensional phase space (where a point represents a microstate of the entire system in terms of 6 co-ordinates for each one of its N constituent particles, e.g. 3 co-ordinates for position and 3 for momentum). The idea, then, is that each macrostate is realizable by all the microstates corresponding to points that belong to the volume representing this macrostate—clearly a volume that can vary enormously from one macrostate to another. This insight led to the identification of the volume representing a macrostate in phase space with the probability of this macrostate and to the definition of entropy in terms of this probability. (This ahistorical account is closer to Boltzman than to Gibbs.)
As the number of points is infinite one actually needs to talk of a measure rather than simply of numbers. See note 9 above for references.
- 11.
Entropy supervenes on the microstate of the system in Botzmamm’s statistical mechanics but it is not clear whether the same holds for entropy in the Gibbs formulation of statistical mechanics.
- 12.
This insensitivity is thought to reflect the fact that at (or near) critical points there is a change in the nature of the coupling between components of the system and the range of their relevant interactions. Whereas under normal conditions long-distance coupling and correlations can be ignored, at critical points this idealization is no longer valid and all interactions must be taken into account. Calculation of these overwhelmingly complex processes is made possible by the technique known as the renormalization group, which involves iterative coarse-graining of the system, with the result that the behavior of the system on every coarse-grained level is analogous to the behavior manifested on the preceding (more fine-grained) level. In the course of this iterative process, the differences between levels within the same system, and the differences between the dynamics of different systems, are washed out.
- 13.
See Morrison (2012) and the references cited there.
- 14.
This is clearly the situation in statistical mechanics—the reductionists’ favorite paradigm case--but it is also what happens in simpler cases that are usually thought of in terms of generalization rather than reduction. Strictly speaking, Newtonian mechanics contradicts Galileo’s law of free fall, but the affinity between the two theories’ respective predictions for small enough terrestrial distances induces us to think of Galileo’s law as an instance of Newton’s more general law.
- 15.
Davidson would also object to Kim’s talk of causes as sufficient conditions, but let’s not be pedantic.
- 16.
Multiple realizability in itself does not entail open-endedness. Universality, as we saw, is linked to multiple realizability, but it is conceivable that it is only exhibited in a specific kinds of systems and is not open-ended in the way that the concept of stop sign is.
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Ben-Menahem, Y. (2022). Levels of Reality and Levels of Description. In: Ioannidis, S., Vishne, G., Hemmo, M., Shenker, O. (eds) Levels of Reality in Science and Philosophy. Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History of Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99425-9_2
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