Social construction is an exception to reductionism.
A lot of things could be used as physical currency. Leaves are a bad choice, but things ranging from cowrie shells to obsidian shards have been used. You can’t tell what money is by examining it microscopically...in fact that’;s an problem in archaelogy, where some ancient artifacts remain mysterious despite high-tech investigation. But you can tell what money is by looking outward, at its function, at how it’s used … money is the thing that can be exchanged for any other thing.
And that kind of non-reductionism doesn’t imply anything spooky ..banknotes arent immaterial entities.. and that is very much the point: you don’t have to believe that in strict reductionism in order to be broadly reductionist or materialist.
Originally I thought of an exception where the thing that we don’t know was a constructive question. e.g. given more or less complete knowledge or material science, how to we construct a decent bridge? But it’s an obvious limitation, no self-proclaimed reductionist would actually try to apply reductionism in such situation.
It seems to me that you’re describing a reverse scenario: suppose we have an already constructed object, and want to figure out how works—can reductionism still be used? I’d still say yes.
Take an airplane, for example. Knowing relevant laws of physics and looking at just the airplane, you can’t actually say predict whether it’s going to fly to New Your or Chicago. You need to incorporate the pilot into the model. And the pilot is influenced by human psychology, economics, etc. So on one hand you have the airplane as a concrete physical object, and one the other hand you have the role that airplanes of that type play in human society. BUT! By looking at just the physical properties, you can still infer a great deal about how it’s used.
This too applies to money. Physical manifestations are not actually completely arbitrary—they are either valuable in themselves—hides, grain, salt etc. or they have properties which make them suitable as value tokens—relatively durable and difficult to counterfeit either through scarcity of raw materials or difficulty in manufacturing. There is not as much to say about the physical properties of money compared to airplanes, but the difference is quantitative, not qualitative.
So we’re left with questions about human society. How do humans actually use these objects? Well, it’s often impractical to apply reductionism but it’s still possible in principle. We just don’t know enough yet, or it would be computationally intractable, or it would be unethical etc. And of course, a lot has already been learned though application of reductionism to human psychology.
Social construction is an exception to reductionism.
A lot of things could be used as physical currency. Leaves are a bad choice, but things ranging from cowrie shells to obsidian shards have been used. You can’t tell what money is by examining it microscopically...in fact that’;s an problem in archaelogy, where some ancient artifacts remain mysterious despite high-tech investigation. But you can tell what money is by looking outward, at its function, at how it’s used … money is the thing that can be exchanged for any other thing.
And that kind of non-reductionism doesn’t imply anything spooky ..banknotes arent immaterial entities.. and that is very much the point: you don’t have to believe that in strict reductionism in order to be broadly reductionist or materialist.
Originally I thought of an exception where the thing that we don’t know was a constructive question. e.g. given more or less complete knowledge or material science, how to we construct a decent bridge? But it’s an obvious limitation, no self-proclaimed reductionist would actually try to apply reductionism in such situation.
It seems to me that you’re describing a reverse scenario: suppose we have an already constructed object, and want to figure out how works—can reductionism still be used? I’d still say yes.
Take an airplane, for example. Knowing relevant laws of physics and looking at just the airplane, you can’t actually say predict whether it’s going to fly to New Your or Chicago. You need to incorporate the pilot into the model. And the pilot is influenced by human psychology, economics, etc. So on one hand you have the airplane as a concrete physical object, and one the other hand you have the role that airplanes of that type play in human society. BUT! By looking at just the physical properties, you can still infer a great deal about how it’s used.
This too applies to money. Physical manifestations are not actually completely arbitrary—they are either valuable in themselves—hides, grain, salt etc. or they have properties which make them suitable as value tokens—relatively durable and difficult to counterfeit either through scarcity of raw materials or difficulty in manufacturing. There is not as much to say about the physical properties of money compared to airplanes, but the difference is quantitative, not qualitative.
So we’re left with questions about human society. How do humans actually use these objects? Well, it’s often impractical to apply reductionism but it’s still possible in principle. We just don’t know enough yet, or it would be computationally intractable, or it would be unethical etc. And of course, a lot has already been learned though application of reductionism to human psychology.
You shouldn’t ignore computational tractability, it’s important.
It’s not necessary to strenuously defend reductionism in order to “exclude the supernatural’.