Why Rosenberg and Kaplan's attempt to reconcile physicalism and antireductionism concerning biology is unsatisfactory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A. Rosenberg and D. Kaplan argue that their account of the Principle of Natural Selection (PNS), as a law of physical systems (including those systems studied by biology) underived from familiar physical laws, provides the precisely explanatory autonomy of biology sought after by antireductionists, without violating the principles of reductive physicalism. I argue, however, that the possibility of the PNS being an underived law of physical systems may be neutral to the explanatory autonomy of biology. In fact, if wedded with reductive physicalism (the possibility considered by these authors), it may yield only a very limited explanatory autonomy of biology, no stronger than the quasi-autonomy generally ascribed to it by reductionists. In the physicalist world, the PNS is operational and thus discoverable at the higher ontological levels (those concerning living cells, individuals, groups, populations and species), because the operation of a law concerning higher-level systems is grounded in its operation at the lower levels (atoms and molecules). Consequently, in terms of the explanatory criterion, a generalization discovered by biologists may be established as a law only if its status is confirmed in the form of its applicability to molecular and other systems studied by chemistry and physics. Otherwise, there is a danger that it could be a 'just so story.' The authors' narrow understanding both of antireductionism and biological laws as reducible to those concerning molecular systems provides only an illusory vindication of the explanatory autonomy: in the case of the PNS, although biologists happened to be the first to utilize it, their research concerning cells, individuals, populations and species could not possibly have established it as a law. This results, at best, in the inter-theoretic irreducibility of molecular biology as a discipline of physical science. I argue that a substantial explanatory autonomy of biology concerns the causal powers of biological systems at multiple levels, where the PNS, or any other biological law, is a basic law of nature in that it is concerned with the entities whose causal power is irreducible to that of the lower-level entities. Thus, only if confirmable at the levels higher than the molecular, could the generalizations discovered by biologists reflect such autonomy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".