It is interesting that you managed to get from "the laws of electromagnetism and electrodynamics" to "quantum field theory" without mentioning Maxwell's equations. I am going to be charitable and assume that somewhere in "the laws of electromagnetism and electrodynamics" you include Maxwells equations. — Frederick KOH

Well, yes. The classical theory of electromagnetism indeed incorporates its mathematical expression in the form of Maxwell's equations. Thank you for your generosity.

In either case it is either disingenuousness or ignorance that no mention how those four laws relate to Maxwell's equations.

So, was your point that the four laws that you mentioned somehow "reduce" to Maxwell's equations? With the minor caveat that Coulomb's law just is an approximation (i.e. it doesn't account for "retarded potentials") those laws can be regarded as being unified into a coherent field theory that has been formalized by Maxwell. (Full blown classical electrodynamics also incorporates the Lorentz force law).

I don't see this as a clear case of one theory being reduced to another. (And even if it were, that would lend no support whatsoever to Weinberg's "grand reductionism"; that would just be another instance of "petty reductionism", which pluralists and emergentists are happy to grant). Maybe your point is different. Again, when you have a point to make, if would make our discussion less cumbersome if you would just make it explicitly, rather than rely entirely on the mere asking of rhetorical or gotcha questions.

Do you agree that these four laws developed in a way that is very different from the ones in chemistry? Are they autonomous laws? — Frederick KOH

You were postulating that your question regarding the autonomy of those laws was being asked in 1835. One would have to look up what the status of each of those laws, and of the broad theories they were a part of, were at that time. When a law is first being derived empirically from the identification of some regularity, or of manifest causal networks, in a set of observations and experiments, then the question of the autonomy or derivability of those laws relative to another as of yet unknown theory is an open question. In the case of the laws of electromagnetism and electrodynamics, the question of their potential reduction began to make sense when quantum field theory was developed. It turned out that relative to their "realization base" (higher-energy effective field theories) the laws of quantum electrodynamics were partially autonomous since they involved different degrees of freedom and were, in a sense, multiply-realizable.

But also a sense which does not include instruments and experimental set up in a theory meant to be empirical. — Frederick KOH

This complaint is rather fuzzy. In what way should the sense of the word autonomy "include instruments and experimental set up"? Each theory has its own set of observational concepts and relies on specific types of experimental setups. Reductibiliy (or autonomy) concerns derivability (or lack thereof) of the laws in one set from the laws in the other set. It is a matter of theoretical analysis whether or not such a derivability is possible. But it is a matter of empirical inquiry whether the laws governing the entities belonging to either levels are satisfied.

The gish gallop was from you. From your own switch from "autonomous theories" to "autonomous laws", deftly, and with wiliness, hoping no one would notice that the term used has changed without you characterizing the difference. — Frederick KOH

That's not true. I took some pain to explain the sense in which individual laws can be said to be autonomous relative to the laws that govern the interactions between the material constituents in the lower-level theory. I had explained this here and here among other places.

When the discussion touched chemistry, you used the term "autonomous law" instead of "autonomous theory".

Suppose this question was asked in 1835:

Are the following what you consider to be autonomous laws:

Coulomb's Law
The Biot-Savart Law
Oersted's Law
Faraday's Law of Induction — Frederick KOH

You often present alleged examples of reduction, which I then proceed to analyse. You then ignore my analysis, ask more rhetorical questions, and then challenge me with more examples. What's the point in me analyzing and discussing your own examples in details if you are just going to ignore the analysis again? This new Gish gallop of yours is you answer to my request that you would give me some inkling of the meaning of your claim that: 'It means that "fundamental" theories have two means of being "transported" from their original birthplace to other areas of inquiry.'

This was beginning to look like an argument. Can you make it a little more explicit?

In what sense is QCD autonomous?

The data that theorists sought to explain and whose work resulted in QCD were created by instruments designed on principles that are not based on QCD. — Frederick KOH

In the context of effective field theories, the autonomy at issue is the autonomy of a large-scale, low-energy, theory (such as QED) relative to a smaller-scale, higher-energy, theory (such as QCD). I've already explained the sense in which it is autonomous. In addition to Crowther's paper, referenced earlier (Decoupling emergence and reduction in physics), you can also look up Jonathan Bain, Emergence in Effective Field Theories (2012).

So killing atheists is fine because other people have done nasty stuff? — tom

No. It's not fine. I was merely reinforcing Mariner's point, which you ignored.

No doubt, because they are states. All it takes to establish that is to observe that Islamic minorities in non-Islamic states do not kill all of those people. In other words, statehood is a requirement for those killings; Islam isn't. — Mariner

Indeed. We can also observe that Islamic states kill people who simply are deemed to be enemy of the state, regardless of religious motive, and also that non-Islamic states have killed more than one hundred million innocent people for various reasons in the 20th century alone.

I wonder if other users experienced this. When I select some portion of a message that I want to reply to, there appears a floating button labelled "Quote". The normal behavior when I click on that button is that the selected text then automatically is copied in the edit box below, properly tagged. The trouble is that this button often doesn't work. When I click on it, the selected text gets deselected but nothing gets copied below. I have to re-select the text and click again on the "Select" button. Sometimes it works on the first or second try. Something on the 20th try. I've no idea why it works sometimes and most of the time not.

The formalization, more than just explicitness, gives a sense that there are actual stakes to what's being done – because if you need your models to produce certain results, and they don't, you've failed, and in a concrete way, and this failure leads to a possible metric of improvement. — The Great Whatever

I remember either Timothy Williamson or Scott Soames (or maybe both) making this exact same methodological recommendation. David Wiggins also sometimes formalises some of his arguments in a very precise fashion. But he also proposes the methodological principle that, in order to pass a necessary sanity test, arguments that are couched in technical or semi-technical terms must make sense when rephrased in plain English (or whatever your native language is).

I've realized I've wasted a lot of time constructing myself the left-out arguments in continental philosophy, and it's so refreshing to read people who spell it out. (That said, I still think many of the continentals make extremely good points and have a better synoptic vision. I would like to read them in conjunction.) — csalisbury

I quite agree with you on both counts, regarding the complementary strength/weaknesses of both traditions.

Also: part of the above is that it kind of usea particular individuals to illustrate general laws (i.e. if any individual a with power b does c, then d). The reason the sentence in my example is true has absolutely nothing to do with alex. — csalisbury

Your example then would be an example of a counterfactual conditional statement used to specify what it is for individuals of a specific kind (e.g. human beings) to have the power to benchpress 400 pounds, or to lack this power. Do we have a problem with the semantics of this statement in the actual case where the antecedent is false (i.e. in the actual case where Alex has the power to benchpress 400 pounds?

Rather than being faced with a counterfactual conditional statement where the antecedent describes an unactualized power, as my initial suggestion was meant to be dealing with, we now have an antecedent that describes a power not being possessed by an individual, in the counterfactual case, that he actually possesses. The statement that you propose then is a logical consequence of a partial definition of what it is for individuals of a specific kind not to possess a specific power. This definition could be construed as a partial specification of what it is for actual human beings no to possess the power to lift 400 pounds. It would go something like this: "Someone who raises the bar no more than 3 inches when she attempts to benchpress 400 pounds lack the power to benchpress 400 pounds." The deflationary explanation of the truth of this partial definitional statement would be: "Someone who raises the bar no more than 3 inches when she attempts to benchpress 400 pounds lacks the power to benchpress 400 pounds." is true if someone who raises the bar no more than 3 inches when she attempts to benchpress 400 pounds lacks the power to benchpress 400 pounds.

In line with my previous suggestion, the counterfactual conditional statement regarding Alex can be regarded to be true on account of the fact that it is a logical consequence of this partial definition of the lack of a power to benchpress 400 pounds.

It means that "fundamental" theories have two means of being "transported" from their original birthplace to other areas of inquiry. — Frederick KOH

I don't follow. What are those two means?

I was making a claim about areas of inquiry. We saw a stark example with a simple statement about acids. — Frederick KOH

What I said about broad theories, as opposed to individual laws, is also true of wide areas of inquiry. The explanation of the properties of acids and bases may make reference to both emergent laws and reductive laws. Maybe it is a stark example of the scientific fruitfulness of reductive explanations (Ernst Mayr's "analysis"). So? There are also stark examples of the scientific fruitfulness of non-reductive explanations.

This means that areas of inquiry with autonomous theories are not themselves autonomous. — Frederick KOH

No, it doesn't entail that. The autonomy of whole theories almost always is merely partial, since broad theories encompass both emergent laws and reducible laws. As applied to individual laws, then the autonomy can be total.

Given a question, explanations do not have to stay within a theory, autonomous or not.

They may not need to but they very often do.

So this gives a sense to the word "fundamental" as used by Weinberg whether you agree with his choice of word. The more "fundamental" a theory is, the more widespread the possibility and actuality of its use becomes (especially if you include the theories underwriting the instruments of observation).

Weinberg's "final theory" only is fundamental, then, in the sense that its scope of application is allegedly wider. But it is only wider than the scope of high-level theories owing to the fact that it explains laws that govern either the parts of the entities explained by those theories, or the parts or their parts, or the parts of the parts of their parts, etc. So, it is merely concerned with the ultimate "parts" (or quantum fields or whatever) while abstracting away from emergent structures that don't depend on intrinsic properties of their parts (or of whatever laws govern the phenomena of the "underlying" theories), and that generalize across multiply-realizable domains (and hence actually have wider explanatory scopes than theories merely applying to a bunch of small particles!).

So, Weinberg's preferred arrows of explanations all point towards the smallest parts. He ignores the arrows that point to structural relationships between parts at the same level of mereological composition. His explanation of what is "fundamental" then fails to justify his view of reductionism, since this view is premised in the idea of the convergence of the arrows explanation but he has simply ignored all the arrows that don't ultimately lead to his preferred "fundamental" level.

This seems like an alternative version of modal collapse, which today is widely (though not universally) considered to be a fallacy in modal logic. Usually it is presented as the claim that whatever is actual is necessary, hence it entails strict determinism. — aletheist

Interesting! Indeed, it seems to be equivalent.

1) Actual(P) entails Nec(P) (=def modal collapse)
2) Actual(~P) entails Nec(~P)
3) ~Nec(~P) entails ~Actual(~P)
4) Possible(P) entails P (=def actualism)

Interestingly enough, the route that leads to actualism (or to modal collapse) begins with a healthy dose of Humean skepticism about "natural necessity", or the necessities derived from a realist interpretation of nomological event causation. This leads the Humean skeptic to be equally skeptical about unactualized powers. The last step for the Humean skeptic is to retain the concept of a power but to narrow its scope of application strictly to actualized powers. What is ironical is that this conclusion then condones a strict metaphysical determinism: the strongest possible form of causal neccessitation!

The various theories of truth--correspondence, coherence, consensus, instrumental--only arise within the context of nominalism regarding generals. Pragmatic realism (i.e., pragmaticism) understands truth as encompassing all of these notions, because it is defined as what an infinite community of investigators would believe after an indefinite inquiry. — aletheist

Hmmm... I would hope that that an ideal community of investigators would end up not merely producing a final theory that encompasses all the early theoretical attempts, but that it would also discard some false starts ;-)

What about: "If Pierce had the power to see to it that the stone drops during a lecture, then, if Pierce had dropped the stone during a lecture, it would have fallen."

It seems just as true as the first sentence, but not to be ultimately grounded in some existent having any latent power. — csalisbury

This is a bit tricky because the truth of this sentence seems to entail the position Micheal Ayers labeled actualism (in his brilliant The Refutation of Determinism: An Essay in Philosophical Logic, London: Methuen (1968)). That is the position seemingly endorsed (at least tacitly) by many Humeans that whatever is possible is actual, and whatever isn't actual is impossible. This is also the view that there are no unactualized powers. That's because the subjunctive conditional statement that you propose would entail that the failure for Pierce to exercise his power would count as (conclusive) evidence that he lacks the power.

To explain this further, the OP raises a problem with the correspondence theory of truth. Statements are said to be true if they correspond to some obtaining state of affairs, but statements like "if A had happened then B would have happened" are said to be true even though neither A nor B are obtaining states of affairs. — Michael

Indeed. This is also how I understood the problem.

It's called decoherence. — tom

I know what it's called. Giving it a name doesn't address the issue.

I used to call them "counterfactuals," until someone on this forum insisted that by definition, this means that they must be "counter to fact." I switched to "subjunctive conditionals" to preclude any such terminological debates. — aletheist

OK, but I think the OP meant discuss a semantical problem that is raised specifically by subjunctive conditionals that have a false antecedent -- that is, by counterfactual conditionals in the strict sense.

For the rest of us, Unitary Quantum Mechanics solves the problem of the ontological status of counterfactuals. — tom

I wonder how Unitary Quantum Mechanics deals with the semantics of counterfactual conditional statements that have counterlegal antecedents. (e.g. If Ceasar had led the First Golf War, he would have used catapults. Or, if photons had had a finite rest mass, then they wouldn't be traveling at c)

I can't be in two different branches of a decohered wavefunction. I'm only ever in one. — Michael

Indeed. If there ends up there being two "copies" of you, you never find yourself in a situation where you are both of them.

This thread is about counterfactuals, which I prefer to call subjunctive conditionals; — aletheist

It seems to me that some authors use the phrase "counterfactual conditional" to mean the same as "subjunctive conditional", but it also occurs frequently that the former phrase is restricted to those subjunctive conditionals that have a false antecedent. In recent years, I've also noticed that the adjective "counterfactual" has been used in the wider cultures (e.g. in op-eds.) to mean roughly the same as "false", which I find annoying.

No, what makes the first statement true is not some "power" that Peirce has. Rather, it is the fact that there is a real tendency in the universe for things with mass (such as a stone and the earth) to move toward each other in the absence of some intervening object (such as a man's body). — aletheist

There are many ways to translate statements about occurrences governed by real laws (either deterministic or probabilistic) conceived to be governing sequences of event into statements about occurrences conceived as manifesting the actualization of powers in specific circumstances. Pierce would not have the specific power that I ascribed to him if the masses involved didn't have the power to draw themselves closer to one another. My proposal isn't changed much if you would rspeak of real tendencies rather than of real powers, although I think powers of substances can't always be analysed dispositionally without some loss of meaning. But this caveat isn't really relevant to the issue raised by the OP.

Alright, so to get back on track, what makes a counterfactual true for a deflationary theorist? If Pierce had dropped the stone during a lecture, it would have fallen. That's a true statement, correct? — Marchesk

Yes. The deflationary theorist then would seem to be faced with the same problem that the correspondence theorist was faced with, as andrew4handel explained in the OP. For the deflationary theorist might, at first blush, attempt to explain it thus:

"If Pierce had dropped the stone during a lecture, it would have fallen." is true iff if Pierce had dropped the stone during a lecture, it would have fallen.

Though I am not a logician, it's not even entirely clear to me if there is an unambiguous meaning to the "if and only if, if" complex logical connective that shows up here (even after scope disambiguation). In any case, the strategy that I had suggested might work to simplify the modal semantics a bit (as well as the metaphysics of counterfactual conditionals) is to construe the sentence's meaning as being parasitic on the meaning of a categorical statement about the real power of something. What makes "If Pierce had dropped the stone during a lecture, it would have fallen." true is that "Pierce has the power to see to it that the stone drops during a lecture." is true, since the first sentence can be derived from the second as a material inference from the second one. (i.e., a "material inference", in Wilfrid Sellars's sense, warranted by the conceptual content of the term "power"). And finally, what makes the second sentence about Pierce's power true is that Pierce indeed has this power, as can be ascertained empirically through testing this power of his in some specific circumstances.

So what is the point of deflationary truth? That there is nothing metaphysically significant about truth or propositions? So all one needs to do is give a decent account of knowing, and I suppose some account of how language works, and that's all there is to it? — Marchesk

I think the main point of the deflationary theories of truth is negative. It is to show that meaningful uses of the "...is true" predicate in natural language don't have the metaphysical implications that the correspondence theorists (who also often are naive, or "dogmatic", realists) take them to have.

Of course, when this negative point has been made, then the correspondence theorist is entitled to ask the deflationary theorist what alternative metaphysics/epistemology she might be proposing instead.

(This is somewhat side-tracking us from the problem of counterfactuals raised in the OP, though.)

I see. So a deflationary view of truth is based on Kantian categories of thought. — Marchesk

Well, lets say that it is post-critical in the Kantian sense, and not reliant on anything as crude as naive realism. Many deflationary theorists may only make some minimalist formal points about the semantics of "... is true", and hence aren't committed to any sort of metaphysics or epistemology. But what I had in mind were specific developments of deflationary theories (by McDowell, Wiggins, Hornsby and Rödl) that address the epistemological problem that you raised, and that are broadly neo-Kantian in the way they explain conceptual abilities.

She doesn't, but that doesn't change the fact that you have a sentence in a human language on one side and the state of affairs which makes the sentence true on the other. And so the question is still how the snow being white makes the sentence white, because a sentence a state of affairs, no matter what theory of truth one espouses.

So deflationary theorists still have to account for how we know that the snow is white. — Marchesk

I don't think you meant to say "makes the sentence white", but rather "makes the sentence true".

Indeed, the deflationary theorists also have to discharge this burden. But I think they do, by means of broadly Kantian accounts of (intuition dependent) conceptual abilities and theories of judgment. (See for instance McDowell's Mind and World, or Sebastian Rödl's Categories of the Temporal.)

From a pragmatic realist (i.e., pragmaticist) standpoint, subjunctive conditionals are true when the laws of nature that they express are real generals; i.e., they are operative regardless of what anyone thinks about them. Peirce famously demonstrated this during a lecture by holding up a stone and stating that everyone in the audience knew that if he were to let it go, it would fall to the ground; and this was true even if he never actually let go of the stone. Similarly, a quality is a real possibility; e.g., if one were to shine broad-spectrum light on a red object, it would predominantly reflect it at wavelengths between 620 and 750 nm. Again, this is true even if no one ever actually conducts such an experiment. — aletheist

This is very similar the the suggestion that I made though it appeals to a conception of laws that rests on a metaphysics of events and Humean causation while my one suggestion was made on the background of a metaphysics of substances and powers (and substance/agent causation).

What's the difference between a deflationary and a non-deflationary correspondence? — Michael

The deflationary truth theorists make claims that sound very much like the things correspondence theorists say, but they chip away some of the metaphysically tendentious interpretations of those claims. For instance, a deflationary theorist might happily acknowledge that "snow is white" is true (or can be used to express a true proposition, in English) if and only if snow is white. But she doesn't claim this to imply that there must exist two metaphysically distinct sorts of things -- abstract propositions on the one side, and concrete elements of reality (i.e. states of affair) on the other side -- that somehow problematically correspond to one another. So, I wasn't defending correspondence theories, but merely suggesting that a correspondance theorist might make use of a strategy similar to the one a deflationary theorist might make use of to explain in a realist fashion the meaning of counterfactual conditional statements.

Perhaps something like the coherence theory of truth is better-equipped to handle them. — Arkady

Maybe one the main problems afflicting the correspondence theory of truth is the way in which it seems to presuppose a form of uncritical metaphysical realism. If the "holding" of a state of affairs, and the truth of the proposition somehow expressing this state of affairs, merely give rise to some sort of a "correspondence" of the former with the latter, then the issue of the conceptual structure of "reality" that makes this correspondance possible is rendered problematic. On the other hand, some apparently innocuous statements of the so called correspondence theory could be construed on the lines of a deflationary (or 'identity') theory of truth. This is how some philosophers (e.g. Jennifer Hornsby or Sebasian Rödl) construe Aristotle's claim that “to say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true” (1011b25). Thus construed, the theory doesn't entail nor presuppose any sort of problematic dualism of (conceptualized) propositions and (unconceptualized) states of affairs.

Back to the original question, then, if we admit of conceptually structured states of affairs, what "corresponds" to the truth of counterfactual conditional statements could be their being logical consequences of the things having real albeit unactualized powers. If our metaphysics admits of objects that have among their real properties not only "occurrent" qualities (either "primary" or "secondary") such as geometrical shapes or color, but also real albeit unactualized powers, then the proposition that "if I were to strike this porcelain dish with a hammer, then it would shatter" could be said to be true if the ascription of a real power, of which it is a logical consequence, "corresponds" to a truth about this power (in the deflationary sense of "corresponds"). That is, to say that it is true that a dish is liable to shatter when struck -- ascribing some sort of a "passive power" to the dish -- just is to say that it is liable to shatter when struck. And if that is the case, then any proposition that logically follows from this also is true, and this includes a definite range of counterfactual conditional statements. It is then the truth of this whole range of counterfactual statements that "corresponds" (in the deflationary sense) to something's having real unactualized powers.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that SOME of the laws of chemistry are approximations? — tom

I did not suggest that they were approximations, though some undoubtedly are. For a law not to apply universally need not entail that there must exist a more precise, as of yet unknown, "universal" law that it approximates. (This incorrect expectation lays at the root of Davidson's nomological principle of causality, I think)

My point was different. There are strong arguments to be made (on Kantian/Aristotelian grounds) that any law that purportedly governs empirical phenomena either must have exceptions (i.e. can be interfered with by something (or may fails to apply at some energy scale, etc.) or isn't really an empirically significant law but rather merely is an idealized abstract principle (a mathematical constraint, for instance). But, in the latter case, such a principle must always be interpreted in a determinate empirical context in order to be rendered relevant to the regulation of empirical phenomena that show up within specific domains of inquiry. We are then back to the first situation.

Truly exceptionless "laws" always are unreal abstractions, on that view. This possibility may be obscured by the tendency to conceive of "universal laws of nature" against the background assumption of a metaphysics of temporally instantaneous (and ontologically self-contained) "events" and Humean causation. But empirical results gathered from real experimental setups (and from ordinary human perceptual experience) always must be made sense of on the quite different background of a metaphysics of objects (i.e. traditional "substances") and their specific fallible powers.

Bohr's complementarity principle, in its wider philosophical generalization beyond the narrow scope of quantum mechanics, constitutes an explanation of this, I think. The principles of quantum mechanics determine not only the unitary evolution of pure quantum "states" (this is the abstract "universal" part of the theory) but must also specify the projections of those states onto definite "observables". And the latter always must make at least tacit reference to definite macroscopic experimental setups, as well at to definite human conceptual understandings, and/or pragmatic uses, of those setups.

What does it mean for an explanation to be complete? We are talking about science are we not? — Frederick KOH

Maybe you and I are, but Weinberg isn't. He takes his observation about the apparent convergence of the arrows of explanation produced by science to furnish irresistible evidence for what he takes to be a fundamental fact about "the way the world is". This is why his "final theory" could remain just a "dream", in his view; and "grand reductionism" would still be a true characterization of the ways the world is. The complete explanation at issue amounts to "reduction in principle", not the actual production of complete reductive explanations. You and Rorty may be Deweyan pragmatists. Weinberg isn't.

What Weinberg argues for is effectively the complete determination (which is a matter of metaphysics rather than epistemology) of the principles governing higher-level phenomena (e.g. animal behavior) by the principles governing low-level phenomena (e.g. particle behavior). If this were the case, then, there would exist complete reductive explanations that are knowable in principle, even if they were only really known to God.

My point was that you can occasionally go sideways and still converge. — Frederick KOH

Fair enough. But you can also fail to converge. Weinberg believes it to be an empirical fact (regarding the history of science) that actual arrows of explanation produced by the various special sciences tend to converge in the general direction of particle physics. But he focuses almost exclusively on reductive explanations and assumes without argument that non-reductive explanations that aren't pointing "down" to some underlying theory must be discounted as resting on uninteresting historical accidents (e.g. the contingent fact that an animal species has evolved in this or that way). So, his argument for "grand reductionism" is circular and the product of a lack of imagination (and, presumably also, a lack of familiarity with the analysis of the structure of non-reductive explanations.)

So what is the term you would use when the question "why do elements have the valencies they do" is answered by a theory of quantum mechanics? — Frederick KOH

If the explanation were complete (which I may assume it to be, for the sake of the argument), then the term that I would use is "reductive explanation". Ernst Mayr, in his book What Makes Biology Unique, offers many historical examples of successful reductive explanations in biology. I don't know how many time I must point out that for pluralists/emergentists to deny that *all* genuine explanations of scientific laws are reductive (as Weinberg would require them all to be) doesn't entail that they don't believe any explanation to be reductive. Some high level laws represent cases of strong emergence, and some are reducible. Weinberg wants them all to be reducible, because the only alternative that he can imagine is magic.

In any case, to get back to your specific example of atomic valence, it may be doubted that the explanation of such properties is reductive in kind. See the enlightening discussion of orbital hybridization in the case of the tetrahedral geometry of methane, in section 8 of Michel Bitbol's Downward causation without foundations (There is a direct link to the pdf file down the page.)

Converge. — Frederick KOH

They must converge towards a single point, according to Weinberg. They must converge towards the "final theory", somewhere underneath both the Standard Model of particle physics and General Relativity.

But if it can straddle multiple autonomous laws, why not also admit the objects of the theories of physics? — Frederick KOH

Why not indeed! But the pluralist/emergentist admits readily of them. Remember Ernst Mayr on "analysis"? For one merely to be admitting of the existence of such "reductive" (i.e. analytical) explanations amounts to what Weinberg downplays as mere "petty reductionism". What Weinberg's "grand reductionism" requires is that only the objects of the theories of physics be admitted, or, at least, that only the objects of theories somehow "closer" to the "final theory" of physics be admitted.

So do you agree with this

Valid claims and questions can be made within chemistry that straddles multiple autonomous laws. — Frederick KOH

For sure. It's Weinberg who would object to this, not me. He can't admit of his "arrows of explanation" pointing "sideways" to autonomous laws rather than them all pointing "below" in the general direction of his "final theory"

What do you call the framework which provides the vocabulary to express it and also the conventions used to determine its validity? And is this framework autonomous? — Frederick KOH

I never said anything about the autonomy of "frameworks". I argued that some theories are non-reducible when they explain some emergent phenomena and when some of their explanatory successful laws are autonomous in the sense that they are derived from the joint realization of specific sets of high-level structural features of the systems -- whole equivalence classes of them, as previously explained -- in which those laws apply. (There is an intentional circularity, here). Those high level structural features thereby circumscribe the scope of applicability of the emergent laws.