Xref: utzoo talk.philosophy.misc:1847 comp.ai:3108 sci.bio:1764
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!pasteur!helios.ee.lbl.gov!nosc!humu!uhccux!lee
From: lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,comp.ai,sci.bio
Subject: Re: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence
Message-ID: <3017@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Date: 17 Jan 89 18:11:14 GMT
References: <5038@homxc.ATT.COM>
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 21

From article <5038@homxc.ATT.COM>, by abrown@homxc.ATT.COM (A.BROWN):
" 
" Can someone please E-mail the difference between reductionism and
" non-reductionism...

The Encyclopedia of Philosophy has some stuff under Laws and Theories,
Reductionism, which begins:  "Since theories do not refer directly to
observables, at least prima iacie, and do not make directly testable
statements, the first attempt to clarify their status was the suggestion
that they make a disguised reference to observables; that is, that they
provide some kind of shorthand for observation statements, or that their
content can be exhaustively translated into or reduced to observation
statements.  ..."

The article opposes reductionism to instrumentalism and realism.

So far as I can tell, this "proper" sense of 'reductionism' has
no relation to the way the term was being used in the recent
discussion in these groups, where it meant 'science'.

		Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu