Reconstructing Scientific Logic

Here I explore the metaphysical logic undergirding reductionism. It expresses a linear causal deductivism that seeks to explain events by looking for the elemental causal factors that not only produce but can also completely explain their “emerging” complex properties and powers. The resultant events or structures would have to be nothing but the logical result of the activity of those causal elements, and their behavior would have to be completely explainable by the laws that govern their constituent elements. I claim that this view is essentially the Cartesian program that framed the Seventeenth Century’s Scientific Revolution, which is “nothing but” the mathematization of the Aristotelian deductive logic that has provided the explanatory ideal of scientific inquiry since the fourth century BCE. But why should we assume the real-world adequacy of the Cartesian reduction—or Aristotelian deductive logic, for that matter? Our problem with this logic is not only its inability to address the mind-body problem. It is the more generic problem of explaining the relative autonomy of numerous realms of being from the most “primitive” to the most complex, for which I offer several examples in this chapter.