This can be illustrated by the example of evolution I mentioned: An evolutionary explanation is actually anti-reductionist; it explains the placement of nucleotides in terms of mathematics like inclusive genetic fitness and complexities like population ecology.
This doesn’t acknowledge the other things explained on the same grounds. It’s a good argument if the principles were invented for the single case you’re explaining, but here they’re universal. If you want to include inclusive genetic fitness in the complexity of the explanation, I think you need to include everything it’s used for in the complexity of what’s being explained.
I don’t know if I made this was clear, but the point I make is independent of what high level principles explain thing, only that they are high level. The ancestors that competed across history to produce the organism of interest are not small parts making up a big thing, unless you subscribe to causal reductionism where you use causes instead of internal moving parts. But I don’t like calling this reductionism (out even a theory, really) because it’s, as I said, a species of causality, broadly construed.
This doesn’t acknowledge the other things explained on the same grounds. It’s a good argument if the principles were invented for the single case you’re explaining, but here they’re universal. If you want to include inclusive genetic fitness in the complexity of the explanation, I think you need to include everything it’s used for in the complexity of what’s being explained.
That’s what I mean by complexity, yeah.
I don’t know if I made this was clear, but the point I make is independent of what high level principles explain thing, only that they are high level. The ancestors that competed across history to produce the organism of interest are not small parts making up a big thing, unless you subscribe to causal reductionism where you use causes instead of internal moving parts. But I don’t like calling this reductionism (out even a theory, really) because it’s, as I said, a species of causality, broadly construed.