ABSTRACT
Term or sentence reductionism was popular through the mid-20th century. It was one of two “dogmas” Quine urged fellow empiricists to abandon. Logical positivism is widely acknowledged, and roundly criticized, for advocating a definitional reductionism based on a “verificationist” theory of meaning. The reducing theory’s increased explanatory scope captures reductionism’s “nothing-but”-ism; the reduced theory thereby plays no ineliminable explanatory role. Patrick Suppes suggested an isomorphic “sameness of structure” condition on inter-theoretic reduction within a broader framework which conceived of theories as ordered sets of models. Clifford Hooker accommodated some Feyerabendian features also while keeping reduction as deduction, but replacing the actual reduced theory with its image, already formulated within the descriptive vocabulary of the reducing theory. Explanatory reductionism is then one further conjunct: for any higher-level phenomenon, there is at least one derivation of it from the most fundamental physical level that is explanatory, and that one is its best explanation.
