Abstract
I do not know to what extent this book is philosophical. I therefore do not know how it will serve readers from the field of philosophy. But I do hope at least to pique the interest of its readers in the philosophical problems that underlie communication studies, problems that I now aim to present.
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Notes
- 1.
Statistical explanation limits reductionists in a number of ways that we will not dwell on here. Let me just note briefly that when we attribute statistical properties to entities that we regard as fundamental, we commit ourselves to a position that has significant limitations from an explanatory point of view. Consider, for example, the correlation between smoking and deaths from lung cancer. We no longer doubt that smoking raises the risk of the disease as well as the risk of dying of it. But since this is just a correlation, since some smokers will not get lung cancer, we cannot treat smoking as a satisfactory explanation of lung cancer among smokers , and even less so as an explanation of a particular smoker’s illness, because again, his neighbor who smoked just as heavily did not get cancer. Traditional scientific explanation is deductive: it guarantees a certain conclusion given certain premises. The illness of the sick individual does not and cannot follow from the premise about the correlation with smoking because his neighbor’s non-illness is also compatible with that same premise. We may, of course, go on to search for other causes for the cancer, but that would just be to deny our basic assumption that the correlation that we have found is fundamental, that is, that it expresses our best possible knowledge. Alas, whenever we attribute statistical properties to fundamental entities, that is precisely the case. This is why statistical explanations greatly limit the reductionist.
Returning to the reduction of the ecologist’s “water” to the chemist’s “H2O”, it is vital to note how quickly common sense forgets that this reduction is an idealization—that is, ultimately no more than a correlative approximation. It is a fact, for instance, that if humans and other animals drank H2O they would be dead within hours—from a drop in vital minerals. If the water we drink did not also contain these minerals in addition to H2O, we would not regard it as a source of life. This is why a hasty reduction of the ecologist’s “water” to the chemist’s “H2O” does not allow us to provide a satisfactory explanation of many phenomena known to the ecologist and the biologist. All idealizations, then, leave some aspects of reality unexplainable in principle. Indeed, almost all the properties we regularly attribute to water are emergent in this sense: water expands when it freezes but a single H2O molecule does not, water dilutes other substances but the single water molecule does not, etc.
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Bar-Am, N. (2016). Emergence and Reduction. In: In Search of a Simple Introduction to Communication. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25625-2_5
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