Constitutive Overdetermination
L. A. Paul · The MIT Press eBooks · 2007
Our best philosophical and scientific pictures of the world organize material objects into a hierarchy of levels or layers-microparticles at the bottom, molecules, cells, and persons at higher layers.Are objects at higher layers identical to the sums of objects at lower layers that constitute them?(Note that this question is different from the question of whether composition-as opposed to constitution-is identity.)As I will define the positions, reductionists are monists who claim that constitution is identity and nonreductionists are pluralists who deny it.Paul Oppenheim and Hilary Putnam (1958) present the classic characterization of the layered world model, arguing that the world has multiple layers of objects ordered by the mereological relation of spatiotemporal part to whole. 1 In Oppenheim and Putnam's reductionist model, sums of lower layer objects are identical to objects at higher layers and objects at higher layers are exhaustively (i.e., without remainder) decomposable into parts that are objects at lower layers.Jaegwon Kim describes how the model of the natural world is stratified into hierarchical layers via mereological compositionality:The Cartesian model of a bifurcated world has been replaced by that of a layered world, a hierarchically stratified structure of ''levels'' or ''orders'' of entities and their characteristic properties.It is generally thought that there is a bottom level, one consisting of whatever microphysics is going to tell us are the most basic physical particles out of which all matter is composed (electrons, neutrons, quarks, or whatever).(1993, p. 337; see also Kim 2002, pp.3-4) As Kim notes, the layered world was proposed as a substitute for Cartesian dualism, according to which there were mental substances that were ontologically independent of physical substances; the layered world model rejects mental substances and organizes the physical domain into layers.