Howard wrote:
I come very close to
reductionism in my thinking many times usually in reducing complexity to
simplicity like in reducing human action to object oriented mediation.
Would this be reduction to you - and - is a level of complexity necessary
for emergence or for such a version of social cultural
theory?
I think that many non-reductionists would say that they are all for
"reducing" complexity to simplicity; but unlike the
reductionist, they would say that the description at the higher
(emergent) level is a simpler description than the reductionist
one. So I think that's a different meaning of
"reduction." Is that what you meant? But I think
that emergent, irreducible properties only exist in complex dynamical
systems, perhaps that was part of your meaning too.
Regarding Tolman and phenomenalism:
Tolman's use of some terms is not the same as the canonical philosophical
meanings, which were how I used the terms in my article. In my
article, I was using the following definitions:
"Materialism": an ontological stance that the only substance
that exists in the universe is matter. Through the late 19th and
early 20th century, materialism (in biology anyway) was opposed to
vitalism, the position that living things had some extra, non-material
substance (it could be "the soul" for example but most
vitalists at the turn of the century at least tried to sound
"scientific").
What Tolman calls phenomenalism I have mostly heard called empiricism,
and (as Tolman notes) Hume is usually considered the first major
empiricist. Empiricism is usually opposed to realism, the belief
that there is an underlying reality independent of sense
experience. In this sense, both empiricism and realism are
compatible with materialism. So that's where Tolman and I end up
making contradictory statements.
Many behaviorists were empiricists and thus amenable to logical
positivism (also known as "logical empiricism"). I agree
with Howard that this makes behaviorism weak on theory, because the
always-necessary theory remains implicit.
Comte's positivism is not the same thing as logical
positivism/empiricism. For a good treatment of Comte on positivism,
see Jonathan Turner's chapter "Comte would turn over in his
grave" in his book Classical Sociological Theory.
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