ABSTRACT
One of grandest contemporary battles in the sciences, continuing a bitterly fought debate that has raged over the last half century, is between what I will roughly term ‘scientifi c reductionists’ and ‘scientifi c emergentists’. At the core of scientifi c reductionism is the idea that higher-level entities are all composite entities which are ‘nothing but’ their components-framed in a slogan: ‘Wholes are nothing but their parts’. Scientifi c reductionists, like Steven Weinberg (1994), thus press a special distinction for fundamental physics and “dream”, to use Weinberg’s term, of a ‘Final Theory’: a simple set of laws governing the behaviors of the fundamental entities in simple aggregations which are claimed, in principle, to provide the complete account of everything.
