Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings¶
Wimsatt, W. C. (2007). Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality. Harvard University Press.
Cited by¶
1 citation across 1 artifact.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Reductionism
- Biology: molecular reductionism, explaining organismal traits via genes, proteins, and biochemical pathways, with the gene-centric research program treating phenotype as the upward consequence of molecular machinery. Economics (non-obvious): methodological individualism and micro-foundations, deriving macro phenomena (aggregate demand, business cycles) from the choices of individual rational agents, so that macro-regularities are held to be entailed by the substrate of individual behavior. Cognitive science and philosophy of mind: explaining mental states via neural states, with the reductive program asking whether psychology is, in principle, derivable from neuroscience. Software and engineering: divide-and-conquer decomposition that explains a system's behavior entirely from its modules and their interfaces, the working assumption that correct components correctly composed yield a correct whole.
This sourceAnalyzes reductive decomposition and localization as the heuristic backbone of science and engineering, distinguishing the in-principle question of derivability from the pragmatic question of tractable, modular study.
- Biology: molecular reductionism, explaining organismal traits via genes, proteins, and biochemical pathways, with the gene-centric research program treating phenotype as the upward consequence of molecular machinery. Economics (non-obvious): methodological individualism and micro-foundations, deriving macro phenomena (aggregate demand, business cycles) from the choices of individual rational agents, so that macro-regularities are held to be entailed by the substrate of individual behavior. Cognitive science and philosophy of mind: explaining mental states via neural states, with the reductive program asking whether psychology is, in principle, derivable from neuroscience. Software and engineering: divide-and-conquer decomposition that explains a system's behavior entirely from its modules and their interfaces, the working assumption that correct components correctly composed yield a correct whole.
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