progress in ecoomics, part whatever it is

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Wed Feb 21 13:22:34 PST 2001



>
>The parallel between this situation and that of Steven
>Gould's view on reductionism vs. Justin's is what drew
>me to this article in the first place. In the genetic
>case, Justin is correct to say that the genetic
>determinism is not affected by the shortfall in the
>number of genes. However, he is correct in the same
>sense in which the economist is correct to say that
>the decision to buy rounds of drinks can be
>characterised as one of maximising a utility function.

No: reduction could be an empirical hypothesis. Charcteruzings omething as a utility function is a purely a priori decision, a point made effectively by Mises long ago,a nd more recently in another way by Davidson.


> It can, but the function itself is orders of
>combinatorial magnitude too big to ever be made
>explicit -- just as, under anything but a one-to-one
>genes-to-chracteristics mapping, we're never going to
>be able to identify the "gene" for shagging one's
>teenage graduate students.
>

The grad students get younger and younger. But one needn't identify "the" gene for a behavior to be able to explain the behavior in part by reference to identifiable genes. This is a purely logical point. But it has pragmatic implications. Incidentally, we are talking about determinsim and not reductionism here. Reductionism is noncausal explanation; it points out what something IS. Genes are DNA segments, etc. Shagging your graduate student is not a gene, though it might caused in part by genes.


>Meanwhile, Gould is taking a position analogous to
>Wojtek's in that he's saying that an explanation has
>to explain; it has to give us a road map for choosing
>the right kind of model, and that with the shortfall,
>the analysis of gene pairs isn't going to give us such
>a road map for human behaviour.
>

Try it and see, that's the only way to find out. The multiple realizability argument can't prove you can't do it. I have a paper on this: "Who's Afraid of Multiple Realizability?" in The Sybolic and Connectionist Paradigms (ed. J. Dinsmore 1992).

--jks _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com



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