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This chapter examines the widespread assumptions that intertheoretic reductions are common in the natural sciences and that reducibility serves as a kind of normative constraint upon the legitimacy of the special sciences. While this was the mainline view in philosophy of science in the mid‐twentieth century, it has received decisive criticism within philosophy of science since the 1970s. The basic reasons for this rejection of Carnap‐Nagel style reductionism are recounted in this chapter.

This chapter defends a pluralistic view of science: the various projects of enquiry that fall under the general rubric of science share neither a methodology nor a subject matter. Ontologically, it is argued that sciences need have nothing in common beyond an antipathy to the supernatural. Epistemically one central virtue is defended, empiricism, meaning just that scientific knowledge must ultimately be answerable to experience. Prima facie science is as diverse as the world it studies; and rejection of this prima facie diversity in favour of a spurious aspiration to unity is grounded in a priori assumption not experience. Disunity, however, does not mean disconnectedness, and the connections between different areas of knowledge are an important theme in the book.

Clarifies why Wittgenstein’s philosophy has profound implications for the humanities and human sciences. It sketches the gradual growth, from the Renaissance until the early twentieth century, of awareness of the distinctive nature of the understanding involved in the study of mankind as social, historical, and cultural beings. It explains the weaknesses of the traditional objections to methodological monism and argues that Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and his philosophy of mind and action make a unique and powerful contribution to methodological pluralism and to the autonomy of humanistic understanding.

Truth is one goal for the sciences. But the whole truth cannot be our goal. Hence there is an issue about which truths we aim for in inquiry. This chapter argues that any way of resolving that issue must depend on us and on our values.

The final chapter intends to revive reason or rationality as a source of the a priori in a roughly Kantian spirit. Therefore, the two notions of apriority introduced in Chapter 6 and their dynamic character are more thoroughly explained. This helps grasping the conceptual a priori and its three forms of appearance. However, concepts are not the only source of the a priori. The rational structure of reasons is so as well, as is unfolded in a series of principles. The starting point is the Basic Empiricist principle that is the core of all empiricist attitudes and that is shown to entail two coherence principles expressing something like the unity of science. Then the chapter proceeds to the fundamental issue of the truth-conduciveness of reasons and argues that the Basic Empiricist principle should be strengthened to the Basic Belief-Truth and Basic Reason-Truth Connection, which are further amended by certain stability assumptions. On the basis of Chapter 14, these stronger principles provably entail a weak principle of causality. The moral of all this is: there is substantial and rigorous theorizing about the a priori beyond the merely conceptual a priori.

Considers, first, why the programme of evolutionary psychology appears to have such appeal, despite its epistemological weakness. Answers to this question include a commitment to an ill‐conceived unity of science, a reluctance to accept irreducible contingency, and the rewards that accrue to advocates of even excessively ambitious projects. A final section argues that, contrary to the claims of its adherents, often based on appeals to the naturalistic fallacy, evolutionary psychology has significant political consequences, often of a harmful kind. The impossibility of a rigid fact/value distinction is illustrated with respect to evolutionary psychological theories of rape.

The preceding chapters have developed an account of the aims and practice of science that features, at its core, the idea that idealization is rampant and unchecked. This chapter outlines the implications of these ideas for philosophical views about levels of organization and field divisions in science. First, it is suggested that the phenomena under investigation in science are not organized into discrete levels. Relationships in composition, scale, metaphysical determination, and causal dependence have variously been linked to levels. But idealized representations in the service of diverse aims should lead us to question the idea that different targets of investigation are related in metaphysically significant ways. In turn, causal complexity should inspire caution about limitations placed on relationships of causal influence, like the expectation that they are limited by compositional relationships. These ideas also motivate an alternative view of scientific fields and subfields as reflecting different simplified strategies to pursuing understanding, prediction, and control of causally complex phenomena. Field divisions thus should not be taken to reflect facts about the metaphysical status of the entities under investigation, be it their levels of organization, realization relationships, or relations of causal influence.

This chapter reviews distinctions between kinds of science, which is especially relevant to the book’s topic because it is an area that Karl Popper did not consider in detail. This creates a problem since critics of the hypothesis often do not distinguish between true hypothesis-based science and other kinds that don’t depend on hypotheses, and the traditional divisions of science miss the main points. The chapter distinguishes among several modern kinds of science including Big Science/Small Science and how they relate to Big Data and Little Data, and why Discovery Science is different from hypothesis-testing science. It separates “exploratory” from “confirmatory” studies and explains why this terminology can create confusion in trying to understand science. The differences between applied and basic science are genuine and meaningful because these two kinds of science have different goals and apply different, though overlapping, standards to achieve their goals.

This chapter offers an interpretation of the cybernetics movement that places McCulloch at the centre of the story. By doing so, it illustrates that McCulloch’s cybernetic project can be best understood in light of his interest in psychiatric foundations and the problem of mind and brain. Focusing on McCulloch’s translation of his psychiatric work into the language of cybernetics, his rhetorical strategies in promoting cybernetics, and the challenges he faced, the chapter also highlights the transdisciplinary nature of cybernetics. Further, it illustrates how, despite the origin stories of McCulloch and other members of the cybernetics group, and despite its association with the American unity of science movement, the cybernetics group was more disunified than is commonly argued.

The nineteenth-century cultural elevation of science puts it in some respects in an analogous position to that previously occupied by religion in marking out Western civilization. Beginning in the nineteenth century in Germany, France, and Britain, there developed a comprehensive cultural investment in the idea of the unity of science, which played a crucial role in taking over this task from religion. In this chapter the political, social, and ideological motivations behind the nineteenth-century advocacy of the unity of science are explored. At the same time, it examines the formative moves in the establishment of the unity of science, particularly the attempts of the British Association for the Advancement of Science to regiment the sciences, that is, to decide what to include and what to exclude from the rubric of science, and to order and rank those that it included.

Scientific theories do much more than answer empirical questions. This can be understood along empiricist lines only if those other aspects are instrumental for the pursuit of empirical strength and adequacy, or serving other aims subordinate to these. This chapter accordingly addresses four main questions: (1) Does the rejection of realism lead to a self‐defeating scepticism? (2) Are scientific methodology and experimental design intelligible on any but a realist interpretation of science? (3) Is the ideal of the unity of science, or even the practice of using distinct theories in conjunction, intelligent on an empiricist view? (4) What sense can an empiricist position accord to those theoretical virtues––such as simplicity, coherence, explanatory power––that are not reducible to empirical strength or adequacy? The answers to these questions rely strongly on the pragmatics of scientific inquiry, and advocate a ‘Clausewitz doctrine’ of experimentation as a continuation of theorizing by other means.

Resheathing involves creating something new by changing the environment (the “sheath”) of an already existing object. There is activity of this kind at all scales of the universe. The proposition that resheathing is distinct from cobbling is contrary to dominant contemporary metaphysical views, which are mostly reductive. Sheathing is core to the principle that there is action at all scales of measurement, the single most important idea behind the book’s claim that there can be no Master Science and rejection of a view of the sciences as organized within a hierarchy. This book upholds physicalism and affirms the unity of science, but rejects the fundamentality of physics and the micro scale. It advances instead the metaphysical possibility of the existence of degrees of freedom at larger-than-micro scales, as well as interaction between degrees of freedom at all scales. Rejecting the hierarchical view allows an alternative theory of science that can explain both the unity of science and the autonomy of the sciences.

This introduction takes notes of the fact that we have many different kinds of discourses—moral discourse, mathematical discourse, scientific discourse, fictional discourse, and so on—and that one response to this has been various pluralist doctrines: pluralism about logic, about metaphysics, and about truth. The external discourse demand and the rejection of Quine’s criterion, and a companion doctrine about singular idioms can be used against the various pluralist views. Crucial in the attack is the fact that statements from a discourse-domain can be brought to bear evidentially and deductively to establish and refute statements in quite different discourse-domains. It is a puzzle how this is possible, one which it is promised will be resolved in part II, and specifically in chapter 4.

This chapter examines the confusion regarding the “unity of science.” What has traditionally been called “the unity of science” is a much stronger, and much less plausible, thesis than the generality of physics. Reductionism may be an empirical doctrine, but it is intended to play a regulative role in scientific practice. Philosophers who accept reductivism do so because they wish to endorse the generality of physics in relation to the special sciences. They share the view that all events which fall under the laws of any science are physical events and, hence, fall under the laws of physics. For such philosophers, saying that physics is basic science and saying that theories in the special sciences must reduce to physical theories have seemed to be two ways of saying the same thing.

The preceding chapters have set out a new vision of the unity of science, one that reinvents philosophy and its relationship to the sciences and breathes new life into old philosophical questions. But it also aligns us against classical philosophical pragmatism. It requires that we affirm in a very robust way that the aim of science is truth and not the advantage of those who conduct it.

Chapter 6 analyzes case studies of George Herbert Mead’s students who were influential in promoting interpretations of his work, Charles Morris and Herbert Blumer. The chapter traces their graduate work and early careers in which they received enthusiastic support from Mead, the subsequent place Mead had in their intellectual careers, and the rhetorical justifications they made of their interpretations of Mead against prominent critics. Morris treated Mead’s supposed “social behaviorism” as central to his attempts at philosophical synthesis. His claims relied heavily on the authority of his work with unpublished primary documents in addition to his personal relationship with Mead. Blumer, in contrast, appealed to Mead’s supposed “symbolic interactionism” in his criticisms of dominant American social science, and he mobilized claims on the basis of his personal relationship and the oral tradition passed down from Mead. The chapter argues that these phenomena can be explained only if we acknowledge that Morris and Blumer understood themselves to be participating emphatically in “intellectual projects” that encompassed themselves and their mentor. These intellectual projects are, thus, the nexus where interpretations made about Mead, the unique scholarship of each individual, and their influence on Mead’s reputation all come together in concrete social relationships.

This chapter debates the reducibility of social to psychological sciences as a question of fact rather than of method. So read, it rejects arguments for reducibility based on principles of micro-reduction or the unity of science, the epistemological priority of people or the identification of social groups with sets of people. It argues that social groups are related to their members as causal wholes to their parts, and that what makes social sciences reduce in principle to psychology is a trivial definitional restriction of ‘social’ sciences to group attributes derived from psychological ones. Holist objections to this thesis are considered and rejected.

Although causal explanations by fundamental laws, such as those found in classical physics, are often considered the ideal of science, they are not the understanding scientists have of multilevel, multidisciplinary phenomena. Rather, historical examples show that our understanding generally comes from mechanisms that form a picture of the phenomenon without being unified into a single conceptualization. Historical examples from Bohr’s complementarity and Mayr’s evolutionary biology support this method for explaining brain and behavior without trying to integrate them into a single, causal model.