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