Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Despite many years of philosophical efforts, the debate between reductionism and multiple realizability is still going strong. Perhaps, though, some of the conflict stems from differences in the focus of concerns and interests, or from unclarity of the terms involved. Here we propose a patternist model, with the aim to formally distill the structures that are implicated by the debate (e.g., reduction, multiple realizability, levels), and to tentatively articulate and address some of the characteristic difficulties of the debate (e.g., what is “autonomy” of a “high-level” property? is there a metric for the degree of  dissimilarity between realizers? and for the degree of fine-grain offered by a “high-level” property?). Finally, with respect to questions about the ultimate nature implied by these structures, the model presented here can remain as metaphysically neutral as one considers one can remain with respect to patternist accounts.