RogerS

1. Scope There are two arm-waving views often expressed about the relationship between “determinism/causality” on the one hand and “predetermination/predictability in principle” on the other. The first treats them as essentially interchangeable: what is causally determined from instant to instant is thereby predetermined over any period - the Laplacian view....

After trying to discover why the LW wiki “definition” of Reductionism appeared so biased, I concluded from the responses that it was never really intended as a definition of the Reductionist position itself, but as a summary of what is considered to be wrong with positions critical of Reductionism. The...

The test for an unbiased definition of a philosophical position is (surely) that it is equally acceptable to critics and defenders of the position. I think the definition of reductionism in the wiki blatantly fails this test. The same bias is apparent in the old Sequence posting dealing with reductionism....