X-Message-Number: 22526
From: 
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2003 10:29:11 EDT
Subject: reductionism

David Stodolsky quoted Margaret Thatcher:

"There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, 
and there are families." 

Obviously this is a political statement, not a philosophical or scientific 
one.

The whole reductionism/holism dispute is just more dreary language tangles. 
The behavior of any system must be compatible with the behavior of its 

components, and can in some sense be "explained" thus. The converse is also 
true. It's 
just a matter of convenience. 

Robert Ettinger


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