Pragmatic Holism--论文代写范文精选

在我看来,还原论是一个贫穷的辩论。许多参与者似乎并不是寻求真理或有用的模型建模或理解现象，但只关心支持先前决定位置,留下任何追求真理只在他们选择的范例。下面的paper代写范文进行详述。

Abstract 
The reductionist/holist debate seems an impoverished one, with many participants appearing to adopt a position first and constructing rationalisations second. Here I propose an intermediate position of pragmatic holism, that irrespective of whether all natural systems are theoretically reducible, for many systems it is completely impractical to attempt such a reduction, also that regardless if whether irreducible ‘wholes’ exist, it is vain to try and prove this in absolute terms. This position thus illuminates the debate along new pragmatic lines, and refocusses attention on the underlying heuristics of learning about the natural world.

Introduction 
It appears to me that the reductionist/holist debate is a poor debate. Many of the participants appear not to be seeking truth or useful models about modelling or understanding phenomena but are solely concerned with supporting previously decided positions in the matter, leaving any search for truth solely within their chosen paradigm. The two camps have adopted distinct languages, styles, journals, conferences and criteria for success and thus are largely self-reinforcing and mutually exclusive. 

Here I will argue that the concentration on such dogmatic positions centred around largely abstract arguments is unproductive and fairly irrelevant to practical enquiry. In this way I hope to play a small part in refocussing the debate in more productive directions. I will start by reviewing some of the features of the debate, the versions of reductionism (Section 2.1), some weaknesses in the two sides which make it unlikely that there will be a resolution to the abstract debate (Section 2.2 and Section 2.3) and some irrelevances to it (Section 2.4). I briefly look at some of the general practical limitations to modelling (Section 3) before introducing an illuminating analogy between ordinals and complexity (Section 4). I will argue that the usual definition of computability is too strong (Section 5). Throughout all of the above we see the abstract questions of reducibility coming back down to pragmatic questions which leads me to reject the extreme positions for a more pragmatic approach (Section 6) which will hopefully open up more important and productive questions asked in the conclusion (Section 7).

Versions of reductionism 
The scientific method is not a well defined one, but one that has arisen historically in the pursuit of scientific truth3 . From this practice some philosophers have abstracted or espoused a “purer” form of ideal scientific practice, which is epitomized in the reductionist approach. All of these are subtly different. They all epitomise a single style of inquiry, that any phenomenon, however complex it appears, can be accurately modelled in terms of more basic formal laws. Thus they are rooted in an approach to discovering accurate models of the natural world, namely by searching for simple underlying laws. They range from the abstract question of whether all real systems can be modelled in a purely formal way to more practical issues about the sort of reduction preformed in actual scientific enquiry. In this paper I aim to show the irrelevance of the abstract question; that when faced with a choice of action it is a very similar range of issues that face both the in-principle reductionist and holist. So for the purposes of this paper I will take the abstract definition (*) as my target absolute definition of reductionism (and hence by implication holism).

Weaknesses in the reductionist position 
Foremost in the weaknesses of the reductionist position is that the abstract reductionist thesis itself is neither scientifically testable nor easily reducible to other simpler problems. Thus, although many scientists take it as given, the question of its truth falls squarely outside the domain of traditional science and hence reductionism. Its strength comes from the observation that much successful science has come from scientists that hold this view - it is thus a sort of inductive confirmation. Such inductive support weakens as you move further from the domain in which the induction was drawn. This certainly seems true when applied to various “soft” sciences like economics, where it is spectacularly less successful. The current focusing on “complex systems”, is another such possible step away from the thesis’ inductive roots. A second, but unconnected support comes from the Church-Turing thesis. Here the strength of this thesis within mathematics is projected onto physical processes, since any mathematical model of that process we care to posit is amenable to that thesis. If you conflate reality with your model of it then the thesis appears reasonable, but otherwise not. Thirdly, attempts to formalise any actual scientific reduction in set-theoretic or logical terms, have proved unsatisfactory (see [16]).

This is a perfectly valid pragmatic observation, justifying the search for alternative approaches to the subject. It does not, of course, disprove the CTT and in itself supplies only weak support for extrapolations to broader classes (e.g. all living organisms). An example of the latter is Fishler and Firschein [5], where they give the spaggetti, the string, the bubble and the rubber-band computer as examples of machines that “go beyond” the Turing machine. These examples follow a section on the Busy-Beaver problem, which is interpreted as being a function that grows too fast for any mechanistic computation. 

The examples themselves do not compute anything a Turing Machine can not, but merely exploit some parallelism in the mechanism to do it faster4 . The implication is that since these “compute” these specific problems faster than a single Turing machine, this is sufficient to break the bounders of the Busy-Beaver problem. Of course, the speed up in these example (which are of a finite polynomial nature) is not sufficient to overcome the busy-beaver limitation, which would require a qualitatively bigger speedup. Another example is that used by Kampis [8], that humans can transcend the Goedelian limitations on suitably expressive formal systems. He argues that because any such formal system will include statements that are unprovable by that system but which an exterior system can see are true, and humans can transcend this system and see this, that they thus escape this limitation. He then site’s Church’s example of the conjuction of all unprovable statements as one we can see is true but that is beyond any formal system. 

The trouble with this is the assumption that humans can transcend any formal system to see that the respectively constructed Goedelian statement is true. Although us humans are quite good at this, the assumption that we can amounts to a denial of the CTT already, so this can not possibly used as a convincing counter-example! If you state that the truth of the above is evident to us from viewing the general outline of Goedel’s proof, i.e. from a meta-logical perspective, then there will be other unprovable statements from within this meta-perspective. Here we are in no better position than the appropriate meta-logic for deciding this (without again assuming we are better and begging the question again). Church’s conjunction of unprovable statements gets us no further. We can only be certain of its truth as an reified entity in a very abstract logic (which itself would then have further unincluded unprovable statements at this level) - otherwise we are merely inducing that it would be true based on each finite example, despite that fact that such a trans-infinite5 conjunction is qualitatively different from these (and undefinable in any of the logics that were summed over). 

There are many such examples. To deal with each one here would take too long and distract from the purpose of this paper. Suffice to say that all of these (that I have seen) seem flawed if intended as an absolute counter-example to the Church-Turing Thesis. The basic trouble that the holist faces in arguing against reductionism, is that any argument is necessarily an abstraction. This abstraction is to different degrees formal or otherwise. To the degree that it is informal it allows equivocation and will not convince a skeptic. To the degree that it is absolute/formal it comes into the domain of mathematics and logic where the Church-Turing thesis is very strong (by being almost tautologous). While informal arguments can be used with other holists, in order to argue with a reductionist a more formal argument seems to be required6. It appears that it is a necessity limitation regarding the nature of expression itself that makes any such complete demonstration impossible.

51Due网站原创范文除特殊说明外一切图文著作权归51Due所有；未经51Due官方授权谢绝任何用途转载或刊发于媒体。如发生侵犯著作权现象，51Due保留一切法律追诉权。(论文代写)

更多论文代写范文欢迎访问我们主页 www.51due.com 当然有论文代写需求可以和我们24小时在线客服 QQ:800020041 联系交流。-X(论文代写)