At least Thrasymachus https://iep.utm.edu/thrasymachus/ made no pretense of being morally superior. 'Might makes right,' he told Socrates and left it at that. Preachy demagogues, aka liberal activists, betray a guilty conscience.  Just out with it: you intend to impose your axiology upon your traditionalist enemies, whether or not it can be squared with Reason, Natural Law and the Common Good.  Spare us the soteriological rhetoric- you sanction murder in the form of abortion and euthanasia.   

Reductionism and Scattered Objects

Reductionism and Scattered Objects

Heraclitus infamously said that “you cannot step into the same river twice.”  Nor, on his view, does anything else persist: exist at more than one time. New water is constantly entering a river's bed while that which is there departs.  Nothing else has parts that remain together for long.  Mereological scattering is the norm.  If a thing simply 'reduces' to its material parts, as Heraclitus supposed, then it cannot be identical at any time to that which subsequently bears its name.  For, if it just is the matter of which it is made at a given time, then at any other time, it could not be made of anything else: if a river is identical to all of that (someone pointing) water in a certain river bed, then any other quantity of water in that bed, say, less of it (say, due to evaporation or drainage) cannot be said river- a quantity cannot be diminished or increased without ceasing to be.  Reductionists, thus, must find the belief in diachronic identity problematic, hoping, I shall assume, to avoid Heraclitus’ view at all intellectual costs.  But that is not my main point here.  Rather I want to use this problem to show their position’s untenability.  Reductionism, I shall argue, must collapse into one of its rivals: Formalism or Eliminativism. 

The latter position simply denies the existence of composite beings, positing only simples, partless entities.  The former takes them to be more than the sum of their parts, the aggregate of which is unified by a Form in which it either “inheres” or “participates” (depending on which version of the theory one favors).  Why shouldn’t Reductionism be considered the sensible middle ground between these 2 extremes, one (putatively) profligate the other cramped?  To see why, let us press a putative Reductionist regarding his belief in rivers.  'Your rivers,' we could say, are short-lived, persisting, if they persist at all, for only a miniscule fraction of the time that rivers are commonly thought to last.  Such “soap bubble” like entities hardly seem like rivers at all.  You might just as well abandon your belief in them.  (As Cratylus, one of Heraclitus’ followers apparently did, maintaining that you cannot step into the same river (even) once.)  Part of what it means to be a river is long-lastingness; the ability to persist over considerable periods of time.  If you must treat them as ephemeral, then there is no reason for you resist becoming an Eliminativist, admirable for his rigor.' 

Now suppose he resists this entreaty, clinging, instead, to his belief in rivers; we might then make the following proposal.  Why not, then, treat rivers as like decks of cards or boxes of cookies- 'scatterable'  objects: entities that do not require their parts remaining connected in order to exist?  In that way, the moving of some of a river’s water out of its bed would not destroy it, a la the dealing of a deck of cards or the distributing of a box of cookies?  Heraclitus’ unorthodox dictum would be voided then: as long as one is able to step into some of the river’s water- no matter its location- one can step (again) into that river  (assuming that to step on/into a scatterable object requires only stepping on/into one of its parts).  That is to say, if one is willing to drop (what might be called) the “fixed location” requirement on being a river, one, as a Reductionist, can believe in persisting rivers rather than ephemeral ones. 

This possibility entails, however, a dilemma for the Reductionist.  If she balks at treating rivers as scatterable, then she shows the concern for unity associated with Formalism: why would one worry about the scattering of the rivers parts unless one thought that something important would thereby be lost?  And what else could that be but their unity or oneness?  But then is one not at least tacitly acknowledging that there is more to the river than those parts, viz., that which unifies them or their Form?  On the other hand, should the Reductionist go along with the scatterability proposal, he is again exposing himself to the charge that his view is really only Eliminativism with a conceptual twist.  Why should we take ‘deck of cards’ like rivers any more seriously than ‘soap bubble’ like ones?  Accepting the proposal is tantamount to denying the existence of rivers.  Why go on believing in them should they turn out (philosophically) to be so much different than commonly thought?

It seems, then, that, when challenged in the above manner, Reductionism collapses into one of it rivals.  What explanation is available to the Reductionist for his reluctance to accept the above proposal that does not entail an implicit commitment to substantial Forms?  How can he embrace scatterability without becoming an Eliminativist?