Abstract
In The Structure of Science, Ernest Nagel distinguishes two formal necessary (though not sufficient) conditions of reduction which he characterizes as the requirement of connectability and the requirement of derivability. The first says that, in order to reduce a theory T to another theory T1, some “coordinating definitions” or “bridge laws”, which have the form of conditionals, have to be stated such that they connect all basic predicates of the reduced theory to some basic predicates of the reducing theory. The second requirement is that the laws of the reduced theory have to be deducible from the laws of the reducing theory plus the connecting statement plus, perhaps, some singular statements about initial conditions.
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© 1984 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Moulines, C.U. (1984). Ontological Reduction in the Natural Sciences (1). In: Balzer, W., Pearce, D.A., Schmidt, HJ. (eds) Reduction in Science. Synthese Library, vol 175. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6454-9_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6454-9_5
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