7.17.2002

When you say "reductionism is a quality of reality," I can agree in one sense, but have problems in another. The statement is true in the sense that reality can be "reduced" by human beings to its constituents; but whether that reduction is fundamental or accidental remains, to me, an open question. I am not, as I said, troubled by the human usefulness of the reductionist technique, but I suspect that technique is itself an illusion. As you have already noted, we do not live in the world of table legs & table tops--to say nothing of the organic molecules of which the table is made--but in the world of tables. I was thinking about wood today, & logic. We humans call a great many different substances wood, don't we? From balsa to ebony. But we could arrange things differently, no? Balsa has more in common with a kitchen sponge than it has with ebony & ebony more in common with a metal or mineral than with balsa. To what extent are our logical categories reflections of reality?

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