Zusammenfassung
What is the best question reductionists would have to answer but cannot, and why exactly is there no reductionist answer to that question? To answer this question, we need to identify the relevant question.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See Chalmers (1995)—I briefly return to Chalmers’ ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ problems shortly.
- 3.
See Lewis (1986, pp. ix–x). The phrase comes from his formulation of the view he calls ‘Humean supervenience’.
- 4.
For instance, supervenience claims do no more than state that supervening properties vary with their subven-ing property base (very roughly). They do not explain why that is so. And this is considered by most to be unsatisfactory. See, e.g., Kim (1998).
- 5.
I mean to be echoing Wittgenstein here, who remarks in his Philosophical Investigations, regarding his own earlier Tractatus view, that “a picture held us captive” (Wittgenstein 1953, §15).
- 6.
Indeed, Weisberg expresses a disarming enthusiasm towards this claim later in his book: “For my part, I think it’s super amazing that we might ‘just’ be a physical system. I find it incredibly inspirational to think of myself and the rest of humanity in this way.” (Weisberg 2014, p. 46).
- 7.
Nonreductive physicalism is a curious phenomenon. It brings to light that, indeed, reductive physicalism is a picture holding those defending it captive: it holds them captive to such an extent that it is alright for them to grant it a self-cancelling name (‘nonreductive’ physicalism).—Another symptom of this situation is the following. In the face of the many difficulties that physicalists encounter in their attempts to formulate their distinctive, physicalist thesis, Alyssa Ney has come to defend physicalism as an “attitude”: “physicalism is an attitude one takes to form one’s ontology completely and solely according to what physics says exists” (Ney 2008, p. 9).
- 8.
- 9.
Is it really? What if I have reason to doubt C, won’t I then rather reject A or B, or suspend my judgment?—Sure. This is, however, no objection to the point under consideration; it rather illustrates that point. My judgments aren’t separate elements lying around in my awareness, unconnected. They are united, and their union is precisely my consciousness of their union. Famously, Kripke (1982) presented a reading of Wittgenstein on following a rule (‘Kripkenstein’) that does take note of problems such as the one concerning inference briefly outlined here. Kripke, however, fails to realize that the solution lies in the recognition of the self-consciousness of thought. That is why he ends up with his ‘skeptical solution’ (Kripke 1982, p. 66 ff.).
- 10.
- 11.
The Anscombean tradition in contemporary philosophy of action makes the same point with regard to intentional action: my intentional action is not something independent of my knowledge of it. Anscombe expresses this, for instance, by saying that this knowledge, practical knowledge, is “the cause of what it understands”. See Anscombe (1957, §48), and also Rödl (2007, Chap. 2).
- 12.
How do we know this to be the case, concerning science? Have we discovered it by empirical investigation? Obviously not; compare Rödl (2018, p. 16). The statement that science is concerned with comprehending given phenomena merely conveys the comprehension that is included in science. Science is self-conscious as well.—We will return to this in Sect. 4.4.
- 13.
Notice that I do not thereby claim that cognitive science is a doomed project in its entirety. There might be very many processes that can be described using the ‘automatic’ sort of ‘cognitive systems’ one finds in cognitive science (early visual processing is a good example). But not thought.
- 14.
The question what Gödel’s incompleteness theorems imply with regard to the philosophy of mind is, of course, a vexed one. See, for instance, the two essays by Putnam and Penrose on the topic in Baaz et al. (2011, Chaps. 15 and 16). For what it is worth: I do not think there is any route from Gödel’s incompleteness theorems to conclusions about thought. For one thing (and I owe this observation to Albert Visser), the tendency to traverse that route often results in a dispute over the claim whether the human mind is ‘more powerful’ than anything a mechanism could do (see the mentioned essays by Putnam and Penrose), where the notion of ‘power’ involved equivocates between the very abstract, theoretical concept of what lies within the ‘power’ of a given formal system on the one hand, and concrete mental abilities on the other.
Instead, as I suggested here, the interesting project would be to try to comprehend the significance of Gödel’s results in the light of a proper understanding of thought, and that is, in the light of thought’s self-consciousness.
- 15.
- 16.
I ignore the fascinating question whether entropy itself can be reductively accounted for in terms of statistical mechanics. See, for a classical treatment, Sklar (1993, Chap. 9).
- 17.
In this quotation, Thompson originally has ‘DNA’ instead of ‘entropy’. The point is in the end the same; con-sidering the hypothetical situation in which all and only living things turn out to contain DNA, Thompson writes: “The judgment about DNA, if it were true, would only show how resource-poor the physical world really is. It could make no contribution to the exposition of the concept of life [...]” (Thompson 2008, p. 37).
- 18.
Dupré’s work is full of examples that illustrate the distinctiveness of life. He doesn’t take these observations all the way to a decidedly philosophical articulation of their ground—and therefore he ends with a rather generic insistence that we should shift to a ‘process metaphysics’ across the metaphysical board. See Dupré (2012, 2013, 2018).
- 19.
It is interesting, in this light, to read in one of Gödel’s recently transcribed notebooks the following ‘philo-sophical remark’ on life:
Life is obviously an imperfect structure, which therefore attracts matter from outside [...] and takes it up into its structure. The new structure obviously acts upon itself with a “destructive force”, resulting in the emission of urea and carbonic acid. Does this entire process result in a perfection of the original structure? (Our body only deteriorates over time and only our minds get better.) All of this shows, that life, continuously perfecting itself, comes from something that has no perfection. (Crocco et al. 2017, p. 7, my translation)
It does not seem to occur to Gödel here that destruction may be an integral and crucial part of what it is to live. In any case, Gödel obviously granted life a sui generis position within his philosophical thought—as is also evi-dent from this quote: “Life force is a primitive element of the universe and it obeys certain laws of action.” (Wang 1997, p. 193). See also Kovac (218, §2.2.6) for discussion. For discussion of these and related issues see Mulder (2016).
- 20.
For discussion of these and related issues see Mulder (2016).
- 21.
Chalmers (2012) includes such “totality truths” as facts of a separate kind in his Carnap-inspired Constructing the World.
- 22.
This insight, that the idea of reality is nothing other than the self-consciousness of thought, is central to Rödl’s (2018) Self-Consciousness and Objectivity—its title can be read accordingly.
- 23.
This remark can be found in Gödel’s unpublished manuscript Max Phil VI, 404. I take the quote from Engelen (2016, p. 172), who also provided this English translation. (The Aristotelian proof Gödel here alludes to can be found in his De Anima III (Aristotle 1984, 429a18–29).) Of course, as the \(^*\)-footnote to this remark indicates, Gödel connects this Aristotelian insight with issues in set theory he was thinking about—Russell’s antinomy, the unlimited expansion of the set universe, the idea of proper classes. See Engelen (2016) for discussion.
- 24.
Rödl (2014b, §2) discusses this argument extensively with the help of Plato’s version thereof in his Theaetetus.
- 25.
Here, the traditional opposition between Erklären and Verstehen of course comes to mind.
- 26.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Dutch National Science Foundation NWO, VENI Grant (grant number 275-20-068). I am grateful to Albert Visser for valuable feedback on an early version.
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Mulder, J.M. (2021). The Limits of Reductionism: Thought, Life, and Reality. In: Passon, O., Benzmüller, C. (eds) Wider den Reduktionismus. Springer Spektrum, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-63187-4_4
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