TY - JOUR
T1 - Not a Four-Letter Word
AU - Shanahan, Timothy
N1 - Shanahan, T. "Not a Four-Letter Word" [Review of Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology, by Alexander Rosenberg], BioScience Volume 57, Number 7, July/August 2007, pp. 629-630.
PY - 2007
Y1 - 2007
N2 - Reductionism is a four-letter word, from which all manner of evils are supposed to follow—at least if you believe some of its critics. To be called a reductionist is to be slapped with a term of abuse signaling that one is a crass, unsophisticated epistemic leveler, perhaps suffering from a bad case of physics envy. It wasn’t always so. During the heyday of logical empiricism in the philosophy of science (the 1940s and 1950s), “reduction”was considered the summum bonum of a philosophical account of natural science (which meant, in practice, physics).
AB - Reductionism is a four-letter word, from which all manner of evils are supposed to follow—at least if you believe some of its critics. To be called a reductionist is to be slapped with a term of abuse signaling that one is a crass, unsophisticated epistemic leveler, perhaps suffering from a bad case of physics envy. It wasn’t always so. During the heyday of logical empiricism in the philosophy of science (the 1940s and 1950s), “reduction”was considered the summum bonum of a philosophical account of natural science (which meant, in practice, physics).
M3 - Book/Film/Article review
VL - 57
SP - 629
EP - 630
JO - BioScience
JF - BioScience
IS - 7
ER -