So, chemistry may be reduced to Quantum mechanics (specifically the Standard Model) plus initial conditions of the universe, plus several arbitrary constants, plus General Relativity (in order to provide the conditions for atom formation), plus thermodynamics, at least. Not much of a reduction! — tom

That's true, for sure. But, in addition to this, many of the laws of chemistry are valid only for some specific classes of bounded chemical systems (and presuppose specific boundary conditions, such as the total energy of the system). In that regard, such laws are akin to the unified sets of laws (or norms) of animal physiology and behavior that only apply to specific animals.

But surely you recognize that the situation in chemistry is very different. There is no specific law of chemistry with the reach and scope of QED. — Frederick KOH

Yes, and so? QED may have a wide range of applications and a large domain of validity. This has nothing to do with the question whether or not it might be reducible to some other, more "fundamental", theory.

How do you even stay within a single law when talking about a non-trivial experiment.

How did I "stay within" a single law (whatever that means)? I'm providing counterexamples to Weinberg's imprudent generalization one at a time.

Then I am not sure how to use your terminology here. What are what you call "high level structures" then? Are they logically different for each specific law even it they refer to the same sort of objects? — Frederick KOH

I don't recall using the phrase "high level structures" (though that might aptly characterize the objects and properties directly being governed by the laws of a high-level theory). I once mentioned high-level structural features, which include such things as the boundary conditions of a system, and which can serve as a theoretical basis for the direct derivation of the emergent (irreducible) laws of a high-level theory. Those high level structural features thus constitute the specific conditions under which the phenomena being explained and governed by the high-level theory can arise. They are being pointed at by the multitudinous "arrows of explanation" that mess up Weinberg's "grand reductionism" of explanatory-arrow-convergence.

Do you consider chemistry autonomous from the theories in quantum mechanics? — Frederick KOH

This binary question is much too crude. There are specific laws of chemistry that are autonomous with respect to the laws that govern simple molecular interactions. The situation here is much more complex and disorderly than it is in the case of the relation between to neighboring effective field theories that merely differ with regard to the energy scales of their respective domains of application. I made mention of a specific example concerning networks of chemical reactions a couple of days ago, though I didn't dig up the reference. Refer to Earley's discussion of "concentration robustness" in chemical reaction networks that satisfy the conditions of the theorem proven by Shinar and Feinberg (Structural sources of robustness in biochemical reaction networks, Science (2010) Mar 12). That's in Earley, Joseph E. Three Concepts of Chemical Closure and their Epistemological Significance.

The main point is that autonomy of a scientific discipline with respect to another always is autonomy in some specific respects. Some laws of chemistry are emergent, some aren't.

So there is a directionality between the two, leaving aside what to conclude from this directionality. — Frederick KOH

Yes, there is.

Example "why is the photon massless" is question expressible in terms of QED. — Frederick KOH

Yes, sure. The photon's being massless is a requirement for QED being renormalisable. (I didn't remember that, by the way. I Googled it). What's your point?

In every theory there are open problems describable in terms of the theory itself. Does this apply to what you call autonomous theories? — Frederick KOH

I can't say. Your first sentence is too vague. Maybe you could phrase it more precisely and explain the relevance of your question to what we've been discussing.

Let's get one thing straight first. While EWT is a theory for energies above 246 GeV, it is also for energies below that. In other words it is not illogical to say that it is an alternative theory to QED at energies below that.

Do you disagree? — Frederick KOH

It's rather misleading to call it an alternative to QED when QED can be logically derived from it. It would be better to say that it's a more determinate theory. It is inferentially stronger and hence more falsifiable. (It defines a wider "exluded zone", John Haugeland would say; some potential experimental results that it rules out aren't ruled out by QED).

By the way, I just found out that Karen Crowther recently published a book: Effective Spacetime: Understanding Emergence in Effective Field Theory and Quantum Gravity

Yes. Because what you say is a bit unexpected.

You define an equivalence class in terms of an existing theory.

You do not define it in terms of a set of empirical data to explain

Have I interpreted you correctly? — Frederick KOH

I'm not sure what the difficulty is. There are parameters of the electroweak theory (EWT, for short) that can only be determined empirically through performing experiments in large particle accelerators (through producing and analyzing interactions that involve energies above 246 GeV). If this were not the case, then EWT would not be underdetermined by the experimental evidence that supports QED, and that is available through observing common lower energy interactions outside of particle accelerators. So, if EWT is considered to be one possible "reduction base" of QED (i.e. one that is actual, and not merely possible), then other similar theories that would have alternate values to the empirically determined (at high energy) parameters of EWT would constitute other possible reduction bases of QED. In other words -- and this is the main point -- the actual values of those determinate parameters of EWT are irrelevant to the explanation of the structure of QED, or to the determination of its specific laws.

So this is the criteria for being in the same equivalence class as QED: — Frederick KOH

No, QED is not part of the relevant equivalence class. You are still badly misconstruing what I said. Are you really incapable of reading a whole sentence? Can't you at least try to make sense of it with reference to the surrounding context of the discussion? Here is the whole sentence, together with the sentence immediately before it:

(PN:) "The theory of the electoweak interaction (i.e. the effective quantum field theory that is found to be empirically valid, as well as theoretically adequate, above the 246 GeV unificaton energy) is underspecified by the theory of quantum electrodynamics. All the alternative theories that would have been consistent with the validity of QED at the lower energy scale (i.e., any energy below 246 GeV) belong to an equivalence class of theories, such that QED can be derived from any one of them."

The alternatives that are being considered are alternatives to the theory of the electroweak interaction; not alternatives to QED itself! It is a class of possible realization bases (analogous to material realization in classical physics or other "high-level" natural sciences) of QED that Karen Crowther meant to specify. If this may help, as an analogy: if you were to define as belonging to the same equivalence class all the hats that fit on your head, then you yourself wouldn't be a member of this equivalence class. You should probably go back and read again the whole post rather than pulling out sentence fragments out of it, because the inferences you are drawing from those fragments are nonsensical, and lead you to miss the point by a mile.

Why? Some of that data was in existence before QED was even close to being a mature theory. — Frederick KOH

The set of theories that I mentioned are singled out as being part of the relevant equivalence class. It was meant as a definition of this equivalence class. You quoted only the first part of the sentence where I explain this and then suggested: "Wouldn't it be more accurate to say all theories (QED included) would have been consistent with experimental results at the lower energy scale". But that's not more accurate. That's saying something else entirely, quite irrelevant to what I meant. I had assumed you meant that I had forgotten to include QED in the relevant equivalence class. It need not be included at all, although, trivially, of course QED also is consistent with the experimental results that it itself has been devised to explain. It looks like, through reading only one half of a sentence of mine, and rushing to respond to it, you misconstrued what it meant.

Since it is an empirical theory, what experimental data is it consistent with? — Frederick KOH

You can read Feyman's popular "QED" book, if you're curious; or Google the Wikipedia page, maybe.

Is there anything you would disagree with here? — Frederick KOH

No but it's not a paraphrase of what I wrote. It ignores the point about underdetermination.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say all theories (QED included) would have been consistent with experimental results at the lower energy scale — Frederick KOH

No. That wouldn't make sense. QED is not part of its own set of higher-energy (and shorter-range structure) possible realization bases.

While underdetermination is well known enough in the philosophy of science, could you give a central text which uses the term underspecified. — Frederick KOH

I meant underdetermined, thank you.

All the more egregiously in the case of Sean Carroll, who is, after all, a physicist. — Wayfarer

It's also a bit disappointing on account of the fact that Carroll, unlike colleagues of his like Hawking, Krauss or Weinberg, isn't utterly dismissive of philosophy. In the comment section of the first one in a series of four blog posts about emergence written by Massimo Pigliucci, George Ellis takes Carroll to task on this very issue (i.e. he points out the inadequacy of Newtonian billiard ball models as a basis for an anti-emergentist argument). Ellis proceed to discuss superconductivity as an example of a emergent theory where the very nature of the "low level entities" (in this case, Cooper pairs) is conditioned by high-level features of a physical system.

As I had suggested, however, even if deterministic Newtonian physics had turned out to be true, strong emergence would still make sense. Werner Heisenberg indeed understood early on, prior even to the development of his matrix mechanics, that if point particles obeying the laws of Newtonian mechanics were somehow conceived to be the material basis of the physical world, it would still not be possible to know determinately all their intrinsic mechanical properties, and thus those properties would become 'noumenal', as it were, and not allowed to be represented as genuine physical magnitudes in an empirically grounded physical theory. (I think that was in The Physicist's Conception of Nature, which I had read in the French edition some 30 years ago, so my memory is fuzzy. But the gist of his argument stuck with me.)

I think this misses the point.

Explanations at any level of emergence can be fundamental. We think of quantum mechanics and general relativity as "fundamental", which they are, but NeoDarwinism and the Theory of Computation are also fundamental.

There is no downwards or upwards causation between fundamental theories. — tom

If for a theory to be fundamental means that it is universal and applies everywhere, at any time, and on every energy/spatial scale, then very few theories are fundamental (not even general relativity). If it means that they provide autonomous explanations that abstract away from features of the contingent material constitution of the entities that they regulate, then stating that they are fundamental doesn't entail anything more than stating that they are autonomous. Hence, I prefer the term "autonomous". Quantum mechanics is more of a framework than it is a theory. It consists in a set of formal features shared by more determinate empirical theories such as quantum electrodynamics. Such theories are likewise autonomous.

The ideas of downward or upward causation don't relate to causal links between the theories themselves which regulate phenomena. They rather pertain to causal relationships between phenomena that belong to distinct levels of description, or scales of intervention. When an intervention on a macro-scale variable reliably produces a specific, targeted, effect on the micro-physical state of a system, for instance, that constitutes an instance of downward causation. The existence of meaningful downward causation is being disputed by some philosophers (such as Jaegwon Kim) and some scientists (such as Sean Carroll) on the same grounds on which they also dispute the existence of strong emergence. They believe both the ideas of strong emergence (and hence of the autonomy of "high-level" theories with respect to "low-level" ones) and the existence of (irreducible) downward causation to be inconsistent with the causal closure of the micro-physical domain. Those objections at least make some sort of intuitive sense in the framework of deterministic classical mechanics, but they are invalid, in my view, in a way that is simply made even more salient by their failures to go through in the context of quantum physics.

So you consider all these autonomous high level theories. In the case of quantum electrodynamics, electroweak theory is not a reduction, "since those higher-level laws are completely insensitive to any other low level features of material constitution that aren't merely deducible from the system's belonging to the relevant equivalence class."

Or did you mean something else? — Frederick KOH

No, that's exactly what I meant. The theory of the electoweak interaction (i.e. the effective quantum field theory that is found to be empirically valid, as well as theoretically adequate, above the 246 GeV unificaton energy) is underspecified by the theory of quantum electrodynamics. All the alternative theories that would have been consistent with the validity of QED at the lower energy scale (i.e., any energy below 246 GeV) belong to an equivalence class of theories, such that QED can be derived from any one of them. But the empirical discovery that one specific theory happens to be empirically adequate above 246 GeV (and up to the grand unification energy of the true GUT theory, presumably), adds nothing to the explanation of the validity of the laws of QED over and above this "reducing" theory belonging to the aforementioned equivalence class. This is where the (partial) explanatory autonomy of QED comes from and why the "arrows of explanation" stemming from Weinberg's question as to "Why?" its laws obtain don't point to specific features of the empirically valid theory of the electroweak force one step up (in order of increasing energy scales) in the hierarchy of effective field theories.

Then are these autonomous high level theories empirical theories? — Frederick KOH

Yes. The ideal gal law is an empirical law, and so are quantum electrodynamics or quantum chromodynamics (both of the latter are effective field theories), for instance. Ethological accounts of animal behavior also are empirical. The number of examples from natural or social sciences is almost infinite. Theories that are fully reducible are the exception rather than the rule.

A further point of clarification. You to refer to "relevant equivalence class" because a single high level theory may have instantiations with different low level features/substrates. Or to use a previous example, the same software can run on different kinds of computers.

Or did you mean something else. — Frederick KOH

No, that's broadly correct. I get the "equivalence class" concept from George Ellis, mainly. (And I also homed in on it independently in a manuscript titled Autonomy, Consequences and Teleology that I wrote in 2009). It is closely connected to Karen Crowther's idea of "universality", which alongside "autonomy" characterizes emergent phenomena and the emergent norms and/or laws that govern them. It is also closely connected to the idea of "multiple realizability" made use of by functionalists in the philosophy of mind. When a functional system is multiply realizable, then all the possible realizations fall under an equivalence class defined by the functional specification.

But multiple realizability, thus conceived, just is one sort of case where Crowther's more general idea of "universality" is exemplified by emergent phenomena in nature; and hence just one sort of way to characterize equivalance classes of systems that admit of the same high-level explanation. The other two cases consist in (2) equivalence classes of micro-physical realizations of a macro-variable (you can refer back to my discussion of the ideal gas law earlier in this thread, for instance) and cases where the underlying physical theory is underdetermined by the emergent theory. This is what is exemplified by the cases of critical phase transitions or broken symmetries that characterize, among other things, the relations between adjacent "effective field theories" that have their domains of validity tied to distinct energy scales. The phenomena of superconductivity and superfluidity exemplify this.

So attempting to synthesize your position: while "those higher-level laws are completely insensitive to any other low level features of material constitution that aren't merely deducible from the system's belonging to the relevant equivalence class", we can seek to explain how low level features enable the high level ones and such enabling explanations are genuinely reductive. — Frederick KOH

Yes, for sure. But this merely amounts to material constitutive analysis; something that Ernst Mayr, for instance, readily acknowledges as an important area (albeit just a part) of fruitful scientific inquiry, and that Weinberg tends to downplay as mere "petty reductionism" as contrasting with his own metaphysical claim of "grand reductionism" to a unique "final theory". But Weinberg is also blind to the positive features of the emergent relations (involving 'autonomy' and 'universality', as explained by Karen Crowther) displayed alongside reductive analysis. Those explanatory relevant positive features of emergent phenomena just destroy Weinberg's grand metaphysical claim since they give rise to "explanatory arrows" that point away from his dreamed of final theory.

Does Weinberg give similar caveats for his version what a fundamental theory is? — Frederick KOH

Not so far as I can see. Also, my objections can't be met with mere caveats. What comes closest to caveats in Weinberg's two texts are his acknowledgement that high-level theories are useful irrespective of them actually having been effectively reduced. But his reductionist claims are explicitly metaphysical rather then methodological/pragmatist. So this weak caveat isn't really relevant to my objection to his stronger metaphysical claim.

Another qualification that he offers is rather more akin to an anti-caveat. He distinguishes explicitly his own brand of "grand reductionism" from the more ordinary "petty reductionism" that he identifies with Mayr's "analysis" of a system onto material constituents in order to highlight bottom-up principles and constraints. Pluralists and emergentists are happy to recognize the explanatory fecundity of such a process of analysis. Weinberg is insistent that his own brand of theoretical ("grand") reductionism is much stronger than that. But it is owing to the strength of his claim that the counterexamples to it exemplified by the clear cases of strong emergence, ubiquitous in normal scientific practice, are fatal to it.

— Wosret

"The consensus of the sages — I recognized this ever more clearly — proves least of all that they were right in what they agreed on: it shows rather that they themselves, these wisest men, shared some physiological attribute, and because of this adopted the same negative attitude to life — had to adopt it. Judgments, judgments of value about life, for it or against it, can in the end never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration only as symptoms; in themselves such judgments are meaningless. One must stretch out one's hands and attempt to grasp this amazing subtlety, that the value of life cannot be estimated. Not by the living, for they are an interested party, even a bone of contention, and not impartial judges; not by the dead, for a different reason. For a philosopher to object to putting a value on life is an objection others make against him, a question mark concerning his wisdom, an un-wisdom. Indeed? All these great wise men — they were not only decadents but not wise at all." -- Nietzche

In that case, that's quite an anti-climax. Engineers create structures like this all the time. Engineers who make parts and components at one level are also at the same time creating abstractions for engineers at the next level. — Frederick KOH

Both the hardware and software levels are abstracts levels. (They're akin to the levels of cell physiology and of whole organism physiology). They also both are real functional levels. The software-level description characterizes real material processes (executions of high-level source code programs) that are both symbolically significant and that abstract away from some features of hardware (or virtual machine) implementation. The hardware-level processes (executions of individual steps of machine code, or, at an even lower level, of elementary binary logical functions) have the same features but what this level abstracts away from are the high-level symbolic modes of operation that are conferred to it (as viewed from above) by the higher level algorithmic structure defined by the software "loaded" into the computer.

Engineers may create structures like this all the time, as you notice, but so does nature. In some cases, the levels may be clear cut, as are the different energy scales in effective field theories, or, in other cases, fail to form neat hierarchies, as is the case for the Earth climate system or for biological organisms. What is common to all of those natural and artifactual (and also cognitive and social) phenomena is the ubiquity of downward causation and their illustrating the inadequacy of Weinberg-style reductionism as a purported description of "the way the world is".

The part of your difference with Weinberg where he does not consider
this autonomy to be fundamental - well I am on his side on this,

So, contrary to what Weinberg believes, the level of his hypothesized "final theory" isn't fundamental as a matter of "the world being the way it is", where this is conceived as stemming form all the "arrows of explanation" being found empirically to converge towards one single theory of particle physics. It rather consists in this lowest "material" level being dignified by him with the word "fundamental" merely through downgrading as not being really "fundamental" (or as being dependent on mere "historical accidents") all the real arrows of scientific explanation (a majority of them, actually) that don't happen to point towards his favored theory. The real phenomenon of the (partial) autonomy of higher level processes and phenomena from their lower level bases of material constitution just destroys his mythical structure of arrow convergence. This grand structure, rather than being a reflection of anything empirically verifiable in nature, turn out to be a product of his prejudice.

It is not a difference in the understanding of the facts. It is one of perspective.
I am sure you can debate perspective, but I would rather debate something else.

So, you really are after an understanding of the facts that doesn't rest on any conceptually informed perspective at all? Or is there a way to do science without making use of any theoretical or empirical concepts?

But there is another error of reductionism, which maybe even deeper: the misconception that our theories form a hierarchy. — tom

Yes, I thing that is true also. Causal networks in complex dynamical systems can be very messy and fail to display clear cases of upward and downward causation operating between neatly distinguished levels. (That doesn't prevent such messy systems from displaying stable attractors such as the deterministic surface warming response to the enhanced greenhouse effect.) The same is true of biological systems. Alan C. Love has written a fascinating paper in which he criticizes the narrow focus of theoreticians on neat hierarchies: Hierarchy, causation and explanation: ubiquity, locality and pluralism. The abstract may be worth quoting in full:

"The ubiquity of top-down causal explanations within and across the sciences is prima facie evidence for the existence of top-down causation. Much debate has been focused on whether top-down causation is coherent or in conflict with reductionism. Less attention has been given to the question of whether these representations of hierarchical relations pick out a single, common hierarchy. A negative answer to this question undermines a commonplace view that the world is divided into stratified ‘levels’ of organization and suggests that attributions of causal responsibility in different hierarchical representations may not have a meaningful basis for comparison. Representations used in top-down and bottom-up explanations are primarily ‘local’ and tied to distinct domains of science, illustrated here by protein structure and folding. This locality suggests that no single metaphysical account of hierarchy for causal relations to obtain within emerges from the epistemology of scientific explanation. Instead, a pluralist perspective is recommended—many different kinds of top-down causation (explanation) can exist alongside many different kinds of bottom-up causation (explanation). Pluralism makes plausible why different senses of top-down causation can be coherent and not in conflict with reductionism, thereby illustrating a productive interface between philosophical analysis and scientific inquiry."

I suspect this autonomy is the autonomy that computer designs at the logical level have. It just happens that economics and technology has determined they be implemented using semiconductor technology. But the design does not depend on it.

Is this a correct paraphrase? — Frederick KOH

That would be a relevant example. We may say that the software laws govern how the computers behave, at the relevant functional level that gives meaning to significant input/output structures. The lower levels of hardware implementation enable rather than govern what the software does (as characterized at the relevant symbolic level). In the case where a bug can be traced to a hardware malfunction (e.g. a real winged bug being fried up on a vacuum tube) rather than to a programming error, and only in that case, are reductive explanations of the episode of software failure to meaningfully be sought after. We can also seek to explain how the software is being enabled to run effectively on a specific machine, and such enabling explanations are genuinely reductive. But they are answers to a different question, and not even indirectly relevant to the high-level question concerning the obtaining of the input/output structure that is fully explained by the software specification. (Indeed the hardware design might plausibly have been implemented by the computer builders in order to enable the execution of the software in accordance with its own autonomous laws. So the ensuing operation of the hardware, under the governance of the software instructions, constitutes a clear case of downward causation.)

Pointless is not impossible. — Frederick KOH

It is pointless because it is impossible. It is also pointless because, even if, per impossibile, such a reductive explanation were to be achieved, it would be redundant with the formal explanation at the emergent level. You would have a case of causal overdetermination or epiphenomenalism. More plausibly, you would have a case where the reductive "explanation" is an overly complicated pseudo-"explanation" that is entirely parasitic on the high-level explanation, since it would merely amount to claiming that the material constituents were determined by low level laws (and initial conditions) to come to realize an arrangement that happens to constitute the system's falling under the high-level concept that is a causal antecedent for the high-level law such as to thereby necessitate a micro-physical arrangement that (as it happens) realizes the consequent of the law. But that is just another way of stating what the high-level law already was understood to necessitate and fully explain in the much simpler high-level terms while abstracting away from the micro-physical features of the system that contribute nothing to the causal explanation.

Using your way to describe autonomy, is it then still possible to also reduce the same explained phenomena into lower level structures? — Frederick KOH

No, it is not possible. That's because it is proven that the high level features shared by systems that belong to the relevant equivalence class fully explain the existence of the high level laws (since the latter can be causally/deductively derived from the former), on the one hand, and since those higher-level laws are completely insensitive to any other low level features of material constitution that aren't merely deducible from the system's belonging to the relevant equivalence class. Hence, the availability of any bottom-up (and hence reductive) explanation is positively ruled out.

Before reduction is attempted, is there a way to tell if the theory was autonomous? — Frederick KOH

Yes, there is. I just explained it in a long message moments ago. (Well, just two short paragraphs, actually). The autonomy of the theory is demonstrated through deriving it directly from high level structural features (and normal boundary conditions, etc.) of the systems belonging to an equivalence class that abstracts away from most determinate (thought irrelevant to the derivation of the high level laws) features of material constitution. In that case, to attempt a reduction of the high level laws just is pointless. It's akin to seeking your keys under the lamp post, just because there is more light there, and in spite of the fact that you know for a fact that you've lost your keys further down the street in the shadows!

A theory that explains sets of phenomena in their own terms, without analysing them into their constituent entities such as gluons, quarks or superstrings, is a theory at the appropriate level of emergence whose fundamental objects are autonomous. — tom

Indeed, explanatory autonomy is the key. As I mentioned earlier, the relevant concept of (at least partial) autonomy is neatly explained in Karen Crowther's Decoupling emergence and reduction in physics while discussing "towers of theories" in the framework of effective field theories -- exactly the scientific context where Weinberg would most strongly expect to find "arrows of explanation" that all point towards the levels of higher energy scales in the direction of his uniquely fundamental "final theory"!

It's borderline and inconclusive irrespective of the people involved. — Frederick KOH

They produced insightful philosophical works and made genuine scientific discoveries irrespective of your stubborn denials.

Suppose we have an empirically adequate theory at a certain level. Does an "emergentist" have any theory to determine whether that theory is autonomous or admits further reduction? — Frederick KOH

That some of the features of the theory that are explanatory fruitful do not admit of further reduction isn't a claim of ignorance. It is a positive claim that can be demonstrated conclusively and without appeal to any sort of magic. What is shown is that this explanatory relevant feature of the system is common to several other systems with heterogeneous material constitutions owing simply to them belonging to an equivalence class: sharing formal/functional features that directly ground those laws. (This is what is being referred to as multiple realizability). That is, it is only from those high level formal/functional features (and also, in many cases, some contingent features of the history of the system and of its normal boundary conditions) that the high/level laws, norms, principles or regularities can be derived and explained.

George Ellis, in his recent books and many articles, provides countless examples of emergent laws in physics, biology, computer science and cognitive science. There also exist an abundant literature pertaining to emergence and top-down causation in chemistry. One paper that I read recently (authored by a professor of chemistry) provides an example of a class of chemical networks where the concentration of a reactant is fixed insensitively to the concentrations of the other reactants in the network provided only that the individual reactions satisfy a specific structural/topological relationship. And that it must be so derives from a mathematical theorem (recently proven) regarding the structure of such networks. I'll dig up the reference if you want.

But at that level you either do borderline science or inconclusive philosophy. — Frederick KOH

Just because a philosopher has a good scientific understanding doesn't necessarily makes her produce "inconclusive philosophy". Also, just because a scientist is well acquainted with philosophy doesn't make her produce "borderline science". Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hillary Putnam, Susan Hurley, Werner Heisenberg, James Jerome Gibson, Ernst Mayr and George Ellis are cases in point.

Either there is such a naturalism and people opposed to naturalism in general are all incapable of reasoning or there is none. I am inclined to conclude the former. — Frederick KOH

Just because the option of a non-reductive naturalism isn't a live option in the minds of several intellectuals (scientists and philosophers alike) doesn't mean that they are incapable of reasoning. It may merely means that the general ignorance of such a position is rooted in widespread prejudice. Correct philosophical accounts aren't all popular philosophical accounts.

In the case of Weinberg, he faces what I consider an insurmountable disadvantage. Even when he engages philosophers, he engages as a scientist. He makes claims that have no hope of being philosophically defended because they are empirical claims but of a different order. They are not properly scientific either because these are claims at a higher level of generality than a scientific theory. — Frederick KOH

I guess I can agree with you that Weinberg's arguments aren't any better when construed as scientific arguments than they are when construed as philosophical arguments. His lack of so much as a cursory acquaintance with the relevant literature on reduction and emergence, either in physics, specifically, or in science, generally (e.g. in chemistry, biology, social sciences and cognitive sciences) also puts him at a severe disadvantage compared with his numerous colleagues who both are well acquainted with this literature, and who also (some of them) actively contribute to it.

Accepting a position does not mean you are indifferent to its flaws. Similar flaws exist in other positions. — Frederick KOH

I am not faulting you for failing to abandon the position that you had taken the burden to defend (and that you had straddled me with the burden of criticizing the specific arguments Weinberg muster in favor of it). I am rather faulting you with failing to even acknowledge (let alone seriously address) my criticisms of Weinberg's positive arguments on the ridiculous ground that any flaws a philosophical position might present aren't necessary fatal to it and hence dont really undermine it.

There isn't one. — Frederick KOH

This is a mere dogmatic denial. There are many such forms of naturalism on offer (both in the philosophical literature and within ordinary scientific practice). It is your burden to show that they entail some sort of unacknowledged belief in magic, or to show that all forms of genuine scientific explanation that don't involve magic (and that aren't either reliant on mysterious emergent laws that defy all explanation) must be reductionistic in Weinberg's sense. I have showed you why Weinberg's demonstration that all "Why?" explanations must either be reductive or magical is flawed, since he overlooks many forms of successful explanation of scientific laws or principles (or natural regularities, biological norms, etc.) that are commonly made use of in ordinary scientific practice and that are neither reductionistic nor magical. They just don't happen to all point neatly in the direction of the unique point of convergence where Weinberg locates his dreamed of "final theory".

No. Please give me exact quote. — Frederick KOH

You asked rhetorically: "How does one reject reductionism without making naturalism as vulnerable." and you seem to value highly the defense of naturalism. Since you mostly argue through asking non-committal rhetorical questions, it's very hard to reconstruct what it is that you might believe of be arguing for, positively. If you feel that your views are being misconstrued, it would be better for you to be more explicit rather than challenge *me* to justify my paraphrases of them, and invite even more misunderstanding without committing to anything.

This does not erase the flaws of naturalism. — Frederick KOH

Well, how else do you "erase" the alleged flaws of a position that you endorse other than through showing that the arguments mustered by your critics against it are themselves flawed or point missing?