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Supervenience and Reduction in Biological Hierarchies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

John Collier
John Collier*
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN47405, U.S.A.
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Extract

Supervenience is a relationship which has been used recently to explain the physical determination of biological phenomena despite resistance to reduction (Rosenberg, 1978, 1985; Sober, 1984a). Supervenience, however, is plagued by ambiguities which weaken its explanatory value and obscure some interesting aspects of reduction in biology. Although I suspect that similar considerations affect the use of supervenience in ethics and the philosophy of mind, I don’t intend anything I have to say here to apply outside of the physical and biological cases I consider.

The main point of this paper is that there is a property of biological systems which makes it both misleading and inappropriate to reduce central biological phenomena to the properties of underlying components. Despite this, reductive explanation has been a major source of innovation in biological theory. The apparent tension can be resolved if underlying properties are explanatorily relevant to the higher level phenomena even though the latter are not strictly reducible to the former. Supervenience, I will argue, is not robust enough to deny reduction while supporting explanatory relevance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 14: Philosophy & Biology , 1988 , pp. 209 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1988

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