Buddhist reductionism

Abstract

When reductionism is seen in this way, non-reductionism is then readily characterized as the view that things of kind K do belong in our ultimate ontology-that there is nothing that Ks “just consist in,�? since Ks are ontologically primitive. (Hence a non-circular analysis of “K�? cannot be given .) But the third possible view about Ks, the eliminativist view, is not so easily captured on a purely ontological approach to the issue. For then the eliminativist about mobs would seem to be one who proposes that we eliminate mobs from our ontology altogether, and it is far from clear how this position would differ from that of the reductionist about mobs. It is only when we bring in the semantic dimension of the issue that these two types of positions can be clearly distinguished . To say, for instance, that organic chemistry may be reduced to quantum mechanics is to make a certain claim about the relation between two theor ies: talk of covalent bonds may be systematically replaced by talk of certain quantum mechanical states, so that the latter theory is thought to expla in the predictive success of the former. By contrast, the demonicpossession theory of disease does not reduce to the germ theory, for there is no way systematically to translate talk of being possessed by a certain demon into talk of bacterial or viral infection.�? © 2001 Roy W. Perrett.