In its strongest form, the sophisticated reductionist view I defended only said that there was a "lower level" explanation, in terms using only the vocabuklary of, say, physics, for some interesting set of higher level phenomena were might care about, such as the mental. Context matters, but the context would be described in physical terms. Totality matters, described in physical terms. The claim would be consistent with saying taht we could also explain psychological or social phenomena in psychological or social terms, without a reductive explanation.
The view is not individualistic. I discussed and rejected what I called Jon Elster's "metaphysical" (not really methodological) individualism in a paper called Functional Explanation and Metaphysical Individualism, Philosophy of Science 1993. The lower level explanations might not themselves use individuals as their basic units, and the possibility f explanations taht did so use individualism is consistentw ith there being holistic explanations as well.
I don't think my interest in reductionism had anything to do with my affection for Hayek. Indeed, it more likely came out of thinking about whether there was a defensible form of materialism available for Marxists, in the context of hanging on to Marxian claims about the possibility of a social science. My interest in Hayek hasn't anything to do with his "individualism" in an ethical or political sense; I just thought and think that he got the calculation argument right. If I do maintain a sort of ethical individualism, it is more closely related to the Marxian idae that the free development of each could be thge condition for the free development of all. That has no implications whatsoever for reductionism in philosophy of science.
Btw, when I was in the Dept of History and Phil of Science at Cambridge in the early 1980s, the dept was located in Watson & Crick's old lab on Free School Lane; the grad student lounge was the room where they worked out the double helix. It made me feel smarter just being there. We used to drink at their local pub, the Eagle, down Free School Lane, where the Trot dept secretary and I were nearly lynched for toasting to the English Republic while the TV showed the Royal Wedding.
--jks
>
>Justin, this must have something to do with your fondness for Hayek;
>I'm going to have to think about it. Some fundamental individualism
>maybe?
>
>Biologists used to think, and most lay people went along with them,
>that genes were the book of life, the determining code, and all that.
>That's rather definitively been shown to be wrong - context and
>totality matter, timing matters. As Gould puts it, "So organisms must
>be explained as organisms, and not as a summation of genes."
>
>Doug
>
>
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com