Knowledge Tree
special sciences
Facts (10)
Sources
Dualism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Winter 2016 Edition) plato.stanford.edu Aug 19, 2003 8 facts
claimSpecial sciences are not fully objective but are interest-relative, meaning they depend on the perspectives and concerns of those who devise them.
perspectivePhysicalists can accommodate the irreducibility of special sciences if they can reduce psychology, as this would allow them to understand the acts that created the irreducible ontologies of other sciences from the bottom up.
claimThe argument from predicate dualism to property dualism asserts that irreducible special sciences are not wholly objective like physics because they depend on interest-relative perspectives on the world.
referenceFodor (1974) is a classic source for the irreducibility of special sciences, and Davidson (1971) is a classic source for the irreducibility of psychological states in the philosophy of mind.
perspectiveThe perspectivality of special sciences suggests a link to property dualism because having a perspective is a psychological state, implying that irreducible special sciences presuppose the existence of a mind.
claimIf the special sciences were reducible to basic physics, their ontologies could be understood from the bottom up as expressions of the physical rather than as interpretations.
claimIrreducible special sciences and their specific predicates depend on the existence of minds and mental states because only minds possess interest-relative perspectives.
claimTerms in special sciences (sciences other than physics) are generally not reducible to physical predicates because phenomena like hurricanes, infectious diseases, currency devaluations, or coups d'etat lack a consistent constitutive structure.
Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Fall 2025 ... plato.stanford.edu Jun 18, 2004 2 facts
claimNon-reductive physicalism combines ontological physicalism with the view that special sciences, such as economics, possess autonomous conceptual and representational levels that are not reducible to the underlying physical substrate, as supported by Hilary Putnam (1975), Richard Boyd (1980), and Jerry Fodor (1974).
perspectiveJerry Fodor argued for the autonomy of the special sciences in 1974, suggesting that understanding the natural world requires a diversity of conceptual systems that may not be strictly intertranslatable.