Reductionism is not just the claim that things are made out of parts. It’s a claim about explanation, and humans might not be smart enough to perform certainly reductions.
So basically the problem is that we haven’t got the explanation yet and can’t seem to find it with a philosopher’s toolkit? People have figured out a lot of things (electromagnetism, quantum physics, airplanes, semiconductors, DNA, visual cortex neuroscience) by mucking with physical things while having very little idea of them beforehand by just being smart and thinking hard. Seems like figuring out human concepts grounding to physics has a similar blocker, we still don’t have good enough neuroscience to do a simulation of how the brain goes from neurons to high-level thoughts (where you could observe a simulated brain-critter doing human-like things in a VR environment to tell you’re getting somewhere even when you haven’t reverse-engineered the semantics of the opaque processes yet). People having that kind of model to look at and trying to make sense of it could come up with all sorts of new unobvious useful concepts, just like people trying to figure out quantum mechanics came up with all sorts of new unobvious useful concepts.
But this doesn’t sound like a fun project for professional philosophers, a research project like that would need many neuroscientists and computer scientists and not very many philosophers. So if philosophers show up, look at a project like that, and go “this is stupid and you are stupid, go read more philosophy”, I’m not sure they’re doing it out of purely dispassionate pursuit of wisdom.
Good—though I’d want to clarify that there are some reductionists who think that there must be a reductive explanation for all natural phenomena, even if some will remain unknowable to us (for practical or theoretical reasons).
Other non-reductionists believe that the idea of giving a causal explanation of certain facts is actually confused—it’s not that there is no such explanation, it’s that the very idea of giving certain kinds of explanation means we don’t fully understand the propositions involved. E.g. if someone were to ask why certain mathematical facts are true, hoping for a causal explanation in terms of brain-facts or historical-evolutionary facts, we might wonder whether they understood what math is about.
So basically the problem is that we haven’t got the explanation yet and can’t seem to find it with a philosopher’s toolkit? People have figured out a lot of things (electromagnetism, quantum physics, airplanes, semiconductors, DNA, visual cortex neuroscience) by mucking with physical things while having very little idea of them beforehand by just being smart and thinking hard. Seems like figuring out human concepts grounding to physics has a similar blocker, we still don’t have good enough neuroscience to do a simulation of how the brain goes from neurons to high-level thoughts (where you could observe a simulated brain-critter doing human-like things in a VR environment to tell you’re getting somewhere even when you haven’t reverse-engineered the semantics of the opaque processes yet). People having that kind of model to look at and trying to make sense of it could come up with all sorts of new unobvious useful concepts, just like people trying to figure out quantum mechanics came up with all sorts of new unobvious useful concepts.
But this doesn’t sound like a fun project for professional philosophers, a research project like that would need many neuroscientists and computer scientists and not very many philosophers. So if philosophers show up, look at a project like that, and go “this is stupid and you are stupid, go read more philosophy”, I’m not sure they’re doing it out of purely dispassionate pursuit of wisdom.
Philosophers are not of a single mind. Some are reductionists, some are illusionists, and so on.
Good—though I’d want to clarify that there are some reductionists who think that there must be a reductive explanation for all natural phenomena, even if some will remain unknowable to us (for practical or theoretical reasons).
Other non-reductionists believe that the idea of giving a causal explanation of certain facts is actually confused—it’s not that there is no such explanation, it’s that the very idea of giving certain kinds of explanation means we don’t fully understand the propositions involved. E.g. if someone were to ask why certain mathematical facts are true, hoping for a causal explanation in terms of brain-facts or historical-evolutionary facts, we might wonder whether they understood what math is about.