Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T06:41:12.328Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

One Epistemological Interfield Relation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Joyce Kinoshita*
Affiliation:
College of the Holy Cross
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

In recent decades, much work has been directed toward clarifying the logical relations among various sciences. Because of an emphasis on the logical aspects of interfield relations, the issue of scientific unity often wore a distinctly logical mantle.1 For example, Robert Causey, a prominent philosopher of this tradition, has linked scientific unity and progress to a project of successive microreductions. He states, “Other things being equal, we tend to feel that our understanding of a class of phenomena increases as we develop increasingly general and intuitively unified theories of that class of phenomena. It is therefore natural to consider the possibility of one very general, unified theory which, at least in principle, governs all known phenomena.” (1977, p. 1)

Kinds of unity separable from reductive logical unity have, of course, been proposed; these include reductive and nonreductive unities of method, translation, and ontology. For example, J.A. Fodor (1974) has argued for a broad kind of ontological unity of token physicalism, and against type reduction.

Type
Part II. Epistemology and the Dynamics of Science
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1988

References

Causey, R. (1977). Unity of Science. Dordrecht: Reidel.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darden, L. and Maull, N. (1977). “Interfield Theories,Philosophy of Science 44: 4364.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, J. (1974). “Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis).Synthese 28: 97115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hacking, I. (1983). Representing and Intervening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511814563CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maull, N. (1977). “Unifying Science Without Reduction.Studies in History and Philosophy 8: 143162.10.1016/0039-3681(77)90012-7CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nassau, K. (1983). The Physics and Chemistry of Color. New York: L. Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Nickles, T. (1973). “Two Concepts of Intertheoretic Reduction.Journal of Philosophy 70: 181201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Optical Society of America (1953). The Science of Color. New York: Crowell Co.Google Scholar
Sklar, L. (1967). “Types of Inter-Theoretic Reduction.British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 18: 109124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Squire, L. (1986). “Mechanisms of Memory.Science 232: 1612–1219.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed