The Disunity of Science

Abstract

A question which has long concerned epistemologists and philosophers of science is whether science is a process which can be expected at some time to reach a terminus. If one does suppose that science will one day be finished, it is clear that one requires a conception of its scope. If, for example, one thought that it consisted of a loosely connected collection of more or less independent theories designed to meet particular theoretical or practical interests, then the view that science might one day be finished would require the extremely incautious prediction that we would at some point cease to acquire any new interests. On the other hand, a position which lends considerable support to the conception of science as converging on a terminus of final truth is the belief that it is in the process of being unified. Such unification is conceived of as proceeding by means of the reduction of each part of science to the science which deals with the structural components of the objects studied by the first science; and since this process is transitive, it follows that if it were to continue to completion, all of science would have been reduced to particle physics. And this provides a rather startling answer to the question about the scope of science: in a strong sense this is just particle physics. It is true that working out the details of the reductions might be complicated and tedious; but the only fundamental scientific laws would be those of particle physics. If any new scientific problems were to arise we would always know in principle how to solve them, i.e., by finding out what was going on at the microphysical level. This is the kind of reductionism which I shall be arguing against in this paper, and the falsity of which is implied by its title. Before getting down to serious arguments, it is necessary to distinguish between some very different reductionist theses that are sometimes proposed. Perhaps the most fundamental distinction that needs to be made is that between reduction in principle and reduction in fact. In metaphysics generally, and particularly in the philosophy of mind, it is frequently thought important to assert the