Why can't someone say the same thing for grounds in general, natural or not? — Frederick KOH

Of course you can say it, truly. Grounds for functional behaviors of human artifacts, or grounds of human cognitive/social phenomena aren't any less plural than are grounds for natural phenomena.

But these things are achieved by even cultures that don't privilege naturalistic explanations. — Frederick KOH

That's certainly true. Naturalistic explanation just is one mode of explanation among many others. It does disclose specific empirical domains that aren't cognitively (or technologically) accessible through other means. But some cultures go by without much of it. They still are capable of making objective judgments and to provide varieties of rational explanations of human behaviors, animal behaviors, and natural phenomena -- some of which often elude us for want of familiarity with, and understanding of, untamed natural environments.

They are not nuclear bonds. — Frederick KOH

I meant molecular (or chemical) bonds. I've no idea how "nuclear" slipped though my fingers.

What is behind this privileging of naturalistic explanations? — Frederick KOH

This may be because we like to disclose order in nature, and disclosing pockets of order often affords opportunities for prediction and control within the empirical/technological domains thus disclosed. This satisfies both out thirst for theoretical knowledge and our needs for security (e.g. reliably finding food in the future). What is at issue in this thread is whether naturalistic grounds for order are plural or whether there might be just one unique fundamental ground for all the areas of orderliness that empirical investigation discloses in nature. Investigation into emergent phenomena -- both within and from physical domains -- seems to reveal pluralism to more sensibly portray nature and our cognitive access to it. This finding also harmonises with what is to be found in social sciences where the phenomena are at least partially constituted by our plural human practices.

Are they equivalent? — Frederick KOH

Weinberg would seem to need to assume that there is just one unique point of convergence to all his "arrows of explanation" lest there be more than one unique "fundamental" theory. And he indeed clearly asserts there to be only one such theory. He needs this to be the case for, else, he would need to investigate more closely the nature of the necessarily non-reductive inter-theoretic relations that hold in between his several "fundamental" theories -- he would have to relax his narrow conception of "explanation" -- and the basis of his faith in reductionism would begin to unravel.

What about the chicken soup? We treat it differently from the King's Touch without having first reduced it. — Frederick KOH

I already responded to this. It is the lack of confidence that there might be a naturalistic (i.e. non-supernatural) explanation of the healing power the King's Trough that undermines our faith in the genuineness of the phenomenon. In the case of the chicken soup, it is easier to imagine a naturalistic explanation. Such an explanation no doubt will make reference to some systemic effect of some ingredient in the soup on human physiology (or bacterial physiology). To assume that any such causal explanation ought to reduce to an explanation in terms of basic physico-chemical laws (let alone in terms of a "final theory" of quantum gravity) just is to beg the question against the non-reductionist. Even within the domains of chemistry and physics, there are lots of explanations of emergent phenomena that are primarily top-down (i.e. that display downward causation, multiple realizability and insensitivity to several features of material constitution, including micro-physical initial conditions).

Quote him. — Frederick KOH

This is a move he commonly makes, as your later chicken soup reference also illustrates. For instances, in Dreams of a Final Theory (p.62) he argues:

(Weinberg) "Finally, there is the question of emergence: is it really true that there are new kinds of laws that govern complex systems? Yes, of course, in the sense that different levels of experience call for description and analysis in different terms. The same is just as true for chemistry as for chaos. But fundamental new kinds of laws? Gleick's lynch mob provides a counterexample. We may formulate what we learn about mobs in the form of laws (such as the old saw that revolutions always eat their children), but, if we ask for an explanation of why such laws hold, we would not be very happy to be told that the laws are fundamental, without explanation in terms of anything else. Rather, we would seek a reductionist explanation precisely in terms of the psychology of individual humans. The same is true for the emergence of chaos. The exciting progress that has been made in this area in recent years has not taken the form solely of the observation of chaotic systems and the formulation of empirical laws that describe them; even more important has been the mathematical deduction of the laws governing chaos from the microscopic physical laws governing the systems that become chaotic." (My emphasis)

Notice that Weinberg again assumes that either the emergent laws must have reductive explanations in terms of deeper scientific principles that govern (in this case) the individual constituents of the high-level entities (i.e. the composite individuals picked up by the high-level "terms") or they must be believed by the strong emergentist to be governed by principles that are "fundamental" in the sense that they don't have any explanaton at all. Functional intra-level, and partly contingent historical, explanations are just ignored by Weinberg.

But Weinberg is also committing a form of projection here. He's the only one who claims that there must exist "fundamental" principles that can admit of no explanation at all. This is what he believes about his prospective "final theory". Emergentists, or pluralist anti-reductionists, need not believe (and few indeed do so believe) that there are laws at any level that are just given and that can have no explanation at all. (Though some of the boundary conditions that restrict their domains of validity may hold in some specific time and area as a matter of historical contingency, and hence need no other explanation than mention of the initial accident). Rather, it is partial autonomy of the high-level (so-called) principles that is claimed by emergentists to hold with respect to low-level laws. On the question of autonomy, as it relates to emergence, see Karen Crowther's enlightening paper 'Decoupling Emergence and Reduction in Physics', European Journal of Philosophy of Science, (2015) 5.

He gave an example using chicken soup and the King's touch. Is the outright dismissal of the King's Touch metaphysics? — Frederick KOH

The dismissal of the alleged healing power of the King's Touch is premised on the lack of a plausible naturalistic explanation (including the placebo effect). Most pluralist/emergentist philosophers that I know would have no trouble dismissing the alleged healing power as a likely myth or fraud. It need not be premised on the mere lack of a reductive explanation. It is Weinberg's belief that all genuine scientific explanation is, at base, reductive (i.e. must point downwards in the general direction of the unique "theory of everything" sought after by theoretical physicists) that leads him to assume that search for non-reductive explanations must be reliant on magical thinking. Lack of reduction doesn't amount to magic.

In his texts, his actual references to other sciences and the views expressed about them contradict what you say. — Frederick KOH

For him merely to be making "actual references" to other sciences hardly contradicts my claim that he believes then all to be less "fundamental" than particle physics. Are you denying that he both endorses reductionism and explains his brand of reductionism as the (alleged) convergence of "Why?" explanations (i.e. "arrows of explanation") that link laws and principles from one science to another more fundamental one? If you think "the views he expresses about" other sciences contradict what I say about those views, it would be useful if you would specify what those views are and what claims of mine you take them to be contradicting.

Finally...

Is this reductionist:

(Weinberg) "When Edelman says that a person cannot be reduced to molecu-
lar interactions, is he saying anything different (except in degree)
than a botanist or a meteorologist who says that a rose or a thun-
derstorm cannot be reduced to molecular interactions? It may or
may not be silly to pursue reductionist programs of research on
complicated systems that are strongly conditioned by history, like
brains or roses or thunderstorms. What is never silly is the per-
spective, provided by reductionism, that apart from historical ac-
cidents these things ultimately are the way they are because of the
fundamental principles of physics." — Frederick KOH

I've finished reading/re-reading Weinberg's two book chapters on reductionism a couple days ago. I also read one of Ernst Mayr's book chapter (Analysis or reductionism?, in What Makes Biology Unique: Considerations on the autonomy of a scientific discipline) in which he lays out the three forms of reductionism Weinberg refers to in Dreams of a Final Theory. But I have been busy with other things. I'll make more comments on both Weinberg and Mayr another time. I think Mayr's explanations of emergence have some problems too, though I agree with him more than I do with Weinberg.

Weinberg focuses on a specific kind of scientific explanations that purport to answer to "Why?" questions regarding scientific laws and principles from one theory, and seek to explain them with reference to another more "fundamental" theory. Explaining emergent laws with reference to laws that govern interactions between constituents of the entities that populate the ontology at the emergent level just is one case of such reductive explanations. Weinberg endorses a form of reductionism that doesn't purport to be pragmatic or methodological but rather amounts to a metaphysical claim regarding "the way the world is" empirically found to be. (In this respect, Rorty and Weinberg are at polar opposites). The way Weinberg cashes out this claim is through observing that the "arrows of explanation" embodied by his "Why?" questions (and their scientific answers) are seen to be converging towards a unique theory: quantum field theory (or some "final" theory that hopefully will unify the Standard Model of particle physics with a theory of quantum gravity).

Weinberg's denial of the autonomy of emergent domains of scientific explanation seems to rest on the belief that the affirmation of such an autonomy amounts to a denial that the laws and principles formulated at this higher-level can have any explanation. He thus views anti-reductionism, pluralism or strong emergentism as forms of obscurantism, super-naturalism or defeatism. It seems not to occur to him that "arrows of explanation" can have a genuine scientific explanatory role even when they don't tend to converge toward a unique "final" theory of everything. His affirmation of the empirical convergence of known arrows of explanation seem to rest on his favoring as more "fundamental" explanations of a reductive sort and thus his defense of metaphysical reductionism (as a statement regarding "the way the world is") ends up being circular.

Isn't the very idea of abstraction leaving things out? — Frederick KOH

One crucial non-reductionist (or pluralist) point that is often overlooked is that both bottom-up material/analytical explanations and top-down formal/functional explanations are achieved though a process of abstraction and hence both leave things out. The former leaves out irrelevant details of functional organization while the latter leaves out irrelevant details of material implementation. What it is that is relevant or irrelevant is conditioned by the pragmatic context and the interests of the theorist/scientist/engineer. None of those two modes of explanation is more fundamental than the other in an absolute sense. Both are incomplete.

Molecules in motion is one thing. Pressure, temperature and volume is another. — Frederick KOH

Indeed. That's because the ascription of properties such as pressure and temperature to macroscopic systems composed of many molecules can only be performed in a restricted range of conditions near thermodynamic equilibrium (or quasi-static equilibrium -- when there is a sufficiently slow transition from one equilibrium strate to another, as occurs, e.g., within individual stages of the Carnot cycle). Furthermore, pressure and temperature states aren't determinate micro-physical states but rather broad equivalence classes of them (a point emphasized by George Ellis's work on emergence and top-down causation). They specify states that are multiply realizable. That's why specifying the temperature and pressure of a specific sample of gas enclosed in a container abstracts away from the specific states of motion of the individual molecules and only determines broad statistical properties of them.

Thus, some emergent laws, such a the ideal gas law, are idealized abstractions that do indeed govern (some features of) the behavior of real gases in restricted ranges of circumstances. But the validity of those laws jointly depends on some of the laws that govern individual molecular interactions (e.g. conservation of energy and momentum) and also on the obtaining of specific boundary conditions of the whole systems that the theorist choses to focus on for some pragmatic and/or theoretical purpose. This focus entails abstracting away from some of the irrelevant features of material constitution and enables the formulation of high-level laws (and hence of unified formal/causal explanations) that apply to several different gases.

Surely you know that DNA replication is something that has been explained at the level of individual molecules. What does "enable" mean in the context of molecules obeying the laws of physics? — Frederick KOH

DNA replication is one thing, genetic inheritance is another. The inheritance at issue is inheritance of function. Biological function only can be explained with reference to the high level functional organization typical of specific forms of life. If you abstract away from the context that gives significance to physiological processes, then you are doing physics and chemistry all right, but you have given up providing a biological explanation. You have just narrowed the focus to questions of material constitution, which are just one sort of question one can ask about a biological system.

Actually it has been done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_bond — Frederick KOH

That's not an explanation of what a gene is and/or of what genes do. Likewise, listing the components of a computer and specifying the way they are soldered together doesn't amount to an explanation of the way such a computer is supposed to function or of what the programs are that such a computer can run. There is much more to a gene being the gene that it is than the nature of the chemical bonds that hold together in DNA molecules the sequence of nucleotides encoding it. The existence of those chemical bonds merely are enabling conditions for those molecules being able to carry stable functional structures from one (or two) living progenitor(s) to its(their) progeny (i.e. whole living organisms). The whole epigenetic context -- which includes many determinate features: (1) of the wider cellular structures and functions; (2) of the whole organism; and (3) of its extended phenotype, and (4) of many aspects of its normal ecological niche (natural affordances) -- plays much more of an explanatory role than do the low level molecular enabling conditions of those high level functions and structures.

Perhaps I chose the wrong words. What I mean is that we can, from sunyata, realize that to do good we shouldn't have an ulterior motive e.g. attaining nirvana or salvation etc. Simply be good. — TheMadFool

Yes, that makes sense. Sorry for misconstruing what you had said. One can indeed act for a reason and one's acting for this reason not constituting one's having an ulterior motive, right?

It is when you realize that there's nothing you become truly free. What follows then is a choice you make on your own terms, devoid of external influences - to be good for no reason whatever. This is beautiful. — TheMadFool

It seems self-contradictory, though. You can't divorce reason from moral goodness. Non-rational animals can't behave well or badly in a moral sense since they lack moral understanding. If someone choses to act well (in a moral sense) for no reason at all, then what would be the measure of her action according to which it isn't seen to be deviating from goodness into some gratuitous cruel or unjust behavior? If you chose to act well -- or to be good -- "on your own terms", as you say, then your own understanding of goodness, as distinguished from evil, provides your reason for acting. This rational understanding becomes the law, or the measure, of your own behavior, as it were, even if this law is autonomously endorsed by you (rather in the way a mathematician acquires intellectual autonomy when she comes to rationally endorse the principles of valid logical inference that she first was trained to follow unreflectively by her community, because those principles later withstood her own attempts at criticizing them.)

These are prevalent caricatures of his work, but they are wrong. — StreetlightX

That is useful to know!

What about Gorgias? — andrewk

The case of Gorgias is difficult to decide for we may never know whether his claim that Empedocle had ordered his office in Leontini to be "eavesdropped on" purported to be factual or merely rhetorical.

Further, the argument is aimed at persuading not the interlocutor, but the audience of the debate. Hence I am not constrained to use techniques that the interlocutor accepts as valid. All that matters is that the audience sees them as valid. — andrewk

Anders Weinstein who introduced me to philosophy 17 years ago (on the comp.ai.philosophy Usenet newsgroup) was constantly reminding me of this through his patient attitude to often fairly hostile fellow group participants. Also useful to do is to picture yourself conversing with your interlocutor's 'future self', as it were. People seldom change their minds on a dime. That doesn't mean that some of your (or her) arguments won't sink in in the distant future, when much of the rhetorical dust will have settled, and many stubborn background assumptions will have mollified.

Under such premises it is futile to argue against anyone's detailed ideas. — jkop

What if your goal precisely is to assert power? Might that not be worthwhile? It need not be nefarious either. One may want to defend ideas in order to assert power on behalf of some oppressed group (or on one's own behalf), say, and not with an aim of revenge but rather as a claim for legitimate re-enfranchisement. I'm not used to argue on those terms, but that seems to be a line that would be available to a constructive (or social-democrat) Foucaultian, if there can be such a beast.

The indeterminate nature of so many questions is real enough, but it doesn't mean the answer is "somewhere in the middle" (though, of course, that's where it might be). — Bitter Crank

I am unsure how to interpret this other than meaning that for some questions truth can lay in the middle (i.e. be ill defined, or nuanced) but for some other questions (also asked in specific contexts regarding well defined particulars) truth is categorical. Am I reading you correctly or is there some point I am missing?

No. — Bitter Crank

In that case we are in agreement. (And I agree with all the rest of your post too.) But then your earlier claim that "a murder spree is a murder spree and war is war", which seemed to preclude the possibility of undecidable cases, or of middle ground judgments, in specific cases where a verdict seems to be called for in point of legality or of moral legitimacy, was misleading.

So, what I know about string theory could be written on the back of a postage stamp in none-too-small lettering. Any thoughts I have about string theory are fourth hand and not worth your time. — Bitter Crank

OK, so you are walking back your claim that the truth of string theory can't be in the middle, and that either the theory works or it doesn't. It could turn out that, just as is the case for Newtonian mechanics (or any other well surveyed, well established scientific theory, in my view) string theory could turn out to have a restricted scope of applicability such that the question of its categorical truth (i.e. non-scope relative) is ill defined.

If the French Resistance shot 10 Nazi officials one day in occupied Paris, neither the Nazis nor the Resistance should call it murder (though the Germans might want to tell the story that way). — Bitter Crank

Sure, but you can also fill up the details of the case such that it isn't so clear cut. Imagine this to occur on the brink of liberation, or with low level officers, or soldiers, who may want to claim prisoner status, etc. etc. Whatever question is raised that problematizes the verdict, you can for sure imagine filling up the details of the case in such a way as to resolve it unambiguously (though still conditionally to the endorsement of a specific value system, as others have pointed out), or, in such a way as to problamatize the case even more. The real world often is like that. The more you learn about some (though not all) specific criminal cases, the more curveballs are thrown at you.

A murder spree is a murder spree and war is war. — Bitter Crank

In order to defend this claim you provided paradigmatic examples of clear cut cases, or examples where our suspension of judgment is naturally lifted after we are appraised of more facts about the case and of relevant features of its context. But is it always like that? Are there not cases where the very existence of a state of war between two nations can be disputed? (e.g. the "invaders" conceive of themselves as "liberators"?) Or where the motives of the criminal come very close to constituting extenuating circumstances. A jury may be deadlocked not on account of lack of information but rather because the applicability of agreed upon criteria to the specific case are in dispute. In such "soft" cases, the claim that truth lies in the middle might be a way of pointing out that both the case for the defense and the case for the prosecution necessarily leave out troublesome features of the case.

I do not have a position on Newtonian Mechanics vs. Quantum Mechanics. Sorry. — Bitter Crank

But you do have a position on string theory??

Challenge accepted. I propose as reference his Reductionism Redux collected in Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries — Frederick KOH

Do you really endorse that? OK, let me read this chapter and I'll comment later.

You forgot the gratuitous name dropping. — Frederick KOH

You are the one who dropped Weinberg's name and endorsed his views on reductionism as authoritative (without providing specific references).

I was referring specifically to the Bouveresse v Rorty debate — Frederick KOH

Yes, and I was reminding you that your take on "this debate" shouldn't motivate your dismissal of Ramberg's unrelated piece, which is directly relevant to the topic of scientistic reductionism, to Rorty's take on it, and is furthermore endorsed by him.

My eyes glaze over when I see claims like this, these critiques, when unpacked and compared with the exact words actually said by the target, usually show themselves to be talking about something else from what philosophically mature scientists mean. — Frederick KOH

"Mature scientists" seldom are mature philosophers and they engage in as much pseudo-philosophy as any other intellectuals (including philosophers) do when they venture strong opinions about subject matter that fall outside their fields of expertise. Since I have Weinberg's book in my library, I read it, and used to be utterly taken by it (during my naive scientistic youth) then maybe you can tell me what specific pro-reductionist argument Weinberg makes that strikes you as being very strong and/or generally ignored in the philosophical literature. (By the way, it was one of my physics teacher, Jean Le Tourneux, who had informed me of the Sokal affair, while it was beginning to make waves in 1996, and who referred me to Weinberg's piece on it in the New York Review of Books.)

Actually I brought up Bouveresse v Rorty earlier in the thread - also in the volume. This debate is more "classical" in terms what you would expect in a realist v postmodernist fight. — Frederick KOH

I know, which is why I brought it up, and also because of Rorty's portrait in your avatar. I thought you might have been open to considering Rorty's own views regarding reductionism. The contributors to the volume comment on various aspects of Rorty's intellectual legacy. There is no such thing as "this debate" that is uniquely being discussed across all the essays. Bouveresse makes one argument, Ramberg another.

There are no "two sides" to a murder spree. — Bitter Crank

Might it not sometimes be a moral decision? What if the killings occur in the context of war? The assassination of Nazi officers in occupied France by the French resistance, say? Vichy loyalists may even dispute that there is a state of war between France and Germany. I am not arguing that the question of the criminality (or justifiability) of the act can't be decided. I think moral question can be objectively decided. But there certainly seems to be two sides there to be discussed and arbitrated. Murder isn't a "natural kind" as electric charge or biological species are.

On the other hand, the truth of string theory in physics is not somewhere in the middle. The theory either works or it doesn't. — Bitter Crank

What about Newtonian mechanics? It works fairly well with billiard balls and planets, not so much with heat, light and electrons. It has a restricted scope of application, works pretty well within that scope and fails outside. For all we know, could this not also turn out to be the case for string theory? I would surmise that, upon Kantian reflections on the concept of law of nature, this must be the case for any scientific theory whatsoever.

But I am dissapointed Steven Weinberg is not on your list.

I suggest you fight him instead of shadow boxing. He is good on reductionism. You want a real fight, fight him. — Frederick KOH

I had assumed the OP in this thread was a human being rather than a shadow. I was a big fan of Steven Weinberg when I was a student in mathematical physics. His Gravitation and Cosmology was the textbook that we used in the general relativity class. I greatly enjoyed his Dreams of a Final Theory and the broadly Kuhnian (and somewhat anti-naive-empiricist) approach to the philosophy of science that he advocates there. His defense of reductionism, though, is fairly naive, philosophically uninformed, and sharply contradicts the pluralistic/pragmatist viewpoints that I have defended here and that you claim to be "banal". If you've been swayed by his defense of reductionism, I would recommend either George Ellis: How Can Physics Underlie the Mind? Top-Down Causation in the Human Context, or Michel Bitbol, Downward Causation without Foundations (scroll down or search the title in the page; there is a direct link to the pdf file) as counterpoints to reductionism that are both scientifically and philosophically informed.

On edit: By the way, another antireductionist paper that might interest you is Bjorn Ramberg (whom I had the chance to meet in Oslo a couple years ago), 'Post-Ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson', published in Blackwell's volume Rorty and His Critics, Brandom ed. This is the best piece in the volume, in my estimation, and maybe also in Rorty's own estimation. He had this to say in his reply: "Most of my responses in this volume are, at least to some extent, rebuttals. But in the case of Bjorn Ramberg's paper, I find myself not only agreeing with what he says, but very much enlightened by it..."

You seem to need a caricature for banal arguments to be effective against. — Frederick KOH

Did you not notice the topic of this thread, the content of the original post, or the arguments advanced by the original poster? It would seem that my views fall squarely into the "post-modernist" tendency that s/he laments. But you assert that my views are true and banal. Maybe you think that the prejudices about science and philosophy expressed by folks like Sam Harris, Alan Sokal, Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and the original poster, are "caricatures" that ought to be ignored. Since this is a philosophy forum, and the OP purports to be advancing a philosophical argument, I am responding to it seriously rather than insisting that we ought not to care about philosophical arguments.

In the generation that included Bohr and Heisenberg and many more. You are contradicting reality. — Frederick KOH

I singled out Bohr and Heisenberg as beacons of light. They were vanguard of a philosophical revolution that is quite antithetical to the "shut up and calculate" attitude that has been wrongly ascribed to them. They never shied from discussing the philosophical implications of the new physics. Most contemporary physicists still happily ignore this revolution and hope for an as of yet undeveloped interpretation of quantum mechanics that would restore something akin to the metaphysical realism that permeated the old Newtonian/Laplacian view of an "objective" mechanistic/deterministic universe that has its salient empirical features determined quite independently from our scientific practices.

When something is banal , its the banal and not the a fortiori that people notice. — Frederick KOH

Scientists are people too, they tend not to notice what you and I now seem to be agreed on, and indeed to angrily take exception to what you now claim to be banal. They tend to object to is as philosophical nonsense, "post-modernism", relativism, etc.

And I was responding to your claim that... — Frederick KOH

Yes, and you didn't contradict it, whereas mine was contradicting yours. You also still are dodging the main point regarding the inevitability of an at least tacitly understood background of conceptual practice and shared concerns and interests for sustaining claims of scientific objectivity.

Put in such general terms, it is true to the point of banality. — Frederick KOH

What is true to the point of banality is a fortiori true. Yet, it is the most common thing to be denied by typical critics of "post-modernism".

So, some scientists do this and others do that. Those who do this tend to be older that those who do that. Got it. — Frederick KOH

I was responding to your claim that "The last time things became degenerative, physicists rushed to the new paradigm." History of science show this to seldom be the case unless your idea of a "rush" is a community wide process that spans decades to centuries. You also are ignoring the main point, relevant to this thread, that even in the odd case of a successful and rapid scientific revolution, the former set of tacit assumptions and unreflexive interpretive practices necessarily gives way to another.