This is the reductionism that I challenge. This is exclusionary reductionism. It assumes its conclusion in its axioms. It does not allow from the discovery of new fundamental laws of the universe.
I don’t agree that reductionism doesn’t allow discovery of new laws. All it fundamentally states is that complex phenomena can be broken down into constituent parts. At least that’s the definition I’m using.
Here we see it pretty clearly. The author takes as given, that is axiomatically, that there are 4 fundamental forces in the universe. This is unscientific. What’s true is that we have gathered evidence that supports a model of the universe that includes these 4 forces. What is given is that we could be wrong in the modeling, we could discover new forces, we could unify these forces, we could subdivide these forces. All of these outcomes are dependent on gathering evidence.
In fact, we’ve already discovered things that don’t fit with the standard model.
This is only really a reasonable position if reductionist is defined expansively, that is to say, it incorporates all possible expansions of knowledge based on empirical evidence. At this point, it ceases to be useful to distinguish this from any other position.
The contrary position this argues against is that emergent phenomena cannot be reduced to their constituent parts.
This is exactly what reductionism means “everything […] doesn’t require anything beyond the known […]”. It is the height of arrogance to assume that everything that will be known about the fundamental laws of the universe is already known.
What that says is that while there is no evidence that the current model cannot explain these things. However, once there is experimental evidence that cannot be explained using the current model then it needs to be updated. It’s perfectly reasonable to work with the assumption that the model can explain the phenomena we observe until that assumption is actually invalidated. I don’t actually see any contradiction with the empirical method here. Having a bias towards existing model is more conservative, but not fundamentally wrong.
But we’ve had to modify these hypotheses dozens of times. They have never been sufficient to explain everything we’ve encountered and they still are insufficient to explain what we continue to encounter. There are plenty of phenomena that are currently in contention with the current formulation of the standard model. To claim that everything we haven’t explained yet is due to “complexity” is hand waving.
I agree here, we do know that there are things that standard model cannot account for, so we know that it’s not fundamentally correct.
Again, my view is that the idea that complex phenomena are reducible is generally sound, but I also agree with your criticism of the article. I don’t think it can be argued that the standard model is fundamentally correct, nor can we even know whether any model is. The most we can say about a model is that it provides explanatory power for the phenomena we have observed.
I don’t agree that reductionism doesn’t allow discovery of new laws. All it fundamentally states is that complex phenomena can be broken down into constituent parts. At least that’s the definition I’m using.
In fact, we’ve already discovered things that don’t fit with the standard model.
The contrary position this argues against is that emergent phenomena cannot be reduced to their constituent parts.
What that says is that while there is no evidence that the current model cannot explain these things. However, once there is experimental evidence that cannot be explained using the current model then it needs to be updated. It’s perfectly reasonable to work with the assumption that the model can explain the phenomena we observe until that assumption is actually invalidated. I don’t actually see any contradiction with the empirical method here. Having a bias towards existing model is more conservative, but not fundamentally wrong.
I agree here, we do know that there are things that standard model cannot account for, so we know that it’s not fundamentally correct.
Again, my view is that the idea that complex phenomena are reducible is generally sound, but I also agree with your criticism of the article. I don’t think it can be argued that the standard model is fundamentally correct, nor can we even know whether any model is. The most we can say about a model is that it provides explanatory power for the phenomena we have observed.