Philosophy of Biology Cafe

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Reductionism in Biology, co-authored by Alan Love and myself, has been published online. We would like to use this opportunity to start a discussion thread on this topic.

Authors of SEP entries are permitted (and even encouraged) to update and revise their entries. For this reason, we are happy about any feedback -- from pointers to broken hyperlinks or relevant literature that we did not cite, queries about unclear passages / issues not discussed, to substantive comments and criticisms about some of the entry's content and structure. We will consider these suggestions and queries when we revise the entry in the future.

But apart from comments directly addressing the SEP entry, feel free to bring up and discuss any issue pertaining to reductionism in biology.

Hi. A little intro, and a question.

I'm the guy posted the pointer to your article on the Yahoo analytic-borders group, that you replied to on the usenet fa.analytic-philosophy echo. I'm a big fan of Ed Zalta's SEP. I'm a CS guy, been working on a sort of philosophy of computation project for some years now, hope to publish "soon". Have read some philosophy of biology, Mayr, Dennett, Nagel, Sober, et al, Millikan, Fodor, Chomsky, more philosophy of science, my own concerns are some kind of neo-analyticity and computationalism, which I think is well-informed by studying biology. Actually, I think biology may be well-informed by studying computation, too.

Anyway, here's a little question. I see in your article you say, "Although only a few reductionists demand explanation to be strictly nomological ...". Well, Fodor has addressed this many times, and I recall, but cannot find, a phrase he used (I think), "non-strict reduction", for the kind of not-exactly nomological reduction that allows for multiple-realization of intelligence as AI, for example, Fodor's major concern having been computational theories of mind. If anybody can give me the reference to where he used the term "non-strict reduction", I'd be very grateful!

Thanks.

BTW, I think it's great for you to host a discussion forum attached to the SEP article. Don't know what kind of traffic you'll get, but it seems a good feature to have.

Josh