I don’t think you are disagreeing with me at all. You pretty much sum my point up with this:
Instrumental reductionism, on the other hand, is only one tool for actually getting things done and, in practice, many situations involving large, complex systems are better tackled by simpler models that selectively ignore some or all of the “microfoundations” in favor of observing high-level patterns. It is nice, but not required, to be able to prove the accuracy of the high-level rules in terms of low-level laws.
This sums it up even better:
TL;DR version: Don’t care about microfoundations. Care about tractability and accuracy. Just because a system can be reduced does not mean a reductionist analysis is useful.
The only major thing I can think of that you might disagree with is that microfoundations tend to increase accuracy.
FWIW I wasn’t talking about epistemic reductionism at all.
I don’t think so, either, except possibly to quibble about an analogy. Sorry if I wasn’t clear on that. I was more attempting to discuss what seems to be the confusion you were responding to and make a more general point, that worrying about high-level models reducing to low-level models is potentially misguided if it’s just reductionism for its own sake.
I don’t think you are disagreeing with me at all. You pretty much sum my point up with this:
This sums it up even better:
The only major thing I can think of that you might disagree with is that microfoundations tend to increase accuracy.
FWIW I wasn’t talking about epistemic reductionism at all.
I don’t think so, either, except possibly to quibble about an analogy. Sorry if I wasn’t clear on that. I was more attempting to discuss what seems to be the confusion you were responding to and make a more general point, that worrying about high-level models reducing to low-level models is potentially misguided if it’s just reductionism for its own sake.