Self-Help for the Reducto-phobes

J.R. Shrader Indiana University at South Bend

Abstract

My purpose here is to provide some help, and maybe even some hope, for a deeply neglected and struggling segment of our society, the reducto-phobes. These are people who "fear" reduction. There seem to be highly varied paths to reducto-phobia--some seem unable to shake the belief that genuine, higher-level explanations (like the economic principle Gresham's law, which states that good money drives bad money out of circulation) require nonreducible properties, whereas some find themselves compulsively affirming the incompatibility of reduction and genuinely causally efficacious mental states, or the incompatibility of reduction and free will. In being reducto-phobes, it is also quite likely that these people are closet "ontological emergentis", people who believe that there are properties that, while reducible to fundamental microphysical properties, are nonetheless dependent upon them, and yet are also causally efficacious and autonomous. Regardless how these people got this way, it is clear that they need help--specifically, metaphysical help. The reason for this is that there has not been much attention paid to the metaphysics of ontologically emergent properties in the literature. In this paper I will present and explain some metaphysical options for the reducto-phobe, i.e., the ontological emergentist. By my lights, to be an intellectually satisfied reducto-phobe, one must be able to describe a relation that holds between ontologically emergent properties and fundamental properties that is, obviously enough, non-reductive, but also allows ontologically emergent properties to be causally efficacious and autonomous. I think there are four possible relations that might do the trick, depending upon what one thinks is required for genuine causal efficacy and autonomy. I will highlight each of these relations (causal dependence, mere supervenience, and two types of realization) and explain how one could incorporate each into a theory of ontological emergence.