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Complexity and Organization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

William C. Wimsatt
William C. Wimsatt*
Affiliation:
Dept. of Biology, Dept. of Philosophy, and Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science, University of Chicago
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Extract

In his now classic paper, ‘The Architecture of Complexity’, Herbert Simon observed that “… In the face of complexity, an in-principle reductionist may be at the same time a pragmatic holist.” (Simon, 1962, p. 86.) Writers in philosophy and in the sciences then and now could agree on this statement but draw quite different lessons from it. Ten years ago pragmatic difficulties usually were things to be admitted and then shrugged off as inessential distractions from the way to the in principle conclusions. Now, even among those who would have agreed with the in principle conclusions of the last decade's reductionists, more and more people are beginning to feel that perhaps the ready assumption of ten years ago that the pragmatic issues were not interesting or important must be reinspected.

Type
Part II Philosophical Problems of Biology and Psychology
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1972 , 1972 , pp. 67 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © 1974 by D. Reidel Publishing Company

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Footnotes

*

Parts of this paper are based on my doctoral dissertation (Wimsatt, 1971) and on work done during the tenure of a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh and a post-doctoral fellowship with the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago, supported by the Hinds Fund for Studies in Evolution. I gratefully acknowledge their support.

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