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1. The ontological construal: is there some robust sense in which
everything in the world can be said to be nothing but the fundamental
constituents of reality (such as super-strings) or at the very least,
determined by those constituents?
2. The epistemological construal: is there some robust sense in which
our scientific theories/schemas about the macroscopic features of the
world can be reduced to or identified with our scientific theories about
the most fundamental features of the world. 110
Yet, according to Silberstein, these two construals are inextricably related. He
explains, moreover, that reductionism is the view that the best understanding of
a complex system should be sought at the level of the structure, behavior and
laws of its component parts plus their relations. The ontological assumption
implicit is that the most fundamental physical level, whatever that turns out to be,
is ultimately the “real” ontology of the world, and anything else that is to keep the
status of real must somehow be able to be ‘mapped onto’ or ‘built out of’ those
elements of the fundamental ontology (Silberstein: 81).
Thus, the three basic presuppositions of the classical mechanistic model of
nature, namely, the indivisible corpuscular final constituents, determinism, and
reduction, by advancement of science turned out to be mere philosophical or
theoretical constructs, instead of being true in the real world. As we will see in
the next section, this leads to the conclusion that the mechanistic model in its
classical or realistic sense has in effect failed.
These difficulties that confront the mechanistic model have forced its proponents
to defend it in several ways. Despite its increasing inconsistency with natural
phenomena, such a defense is now bearing heavily on the metaphysical
assumption that future advancement of science will bring with it scientific
justification of such a view.
110 Silberstein, Michael. 2002, "Reduction, Emergence and Explanation", in Peter Machamer and Michael
Silberstein (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Science, Blackwell, P. 80.
AL-MUKHATABAT Numéro 03 Année 01/2012 لىولأا ةن سلا 30 ددعلا تابطانا
123
ISSN: 1737-6432