You might be interested in two discussions of this issue. One is the opening chapter of Jerry Fodor's "The Language of Thought", a piece often referred to as "the Special Sciences paper", in which he argues essentially that psychological tokens (e.g., my belief at this moment that it is raining out, or this instance of me typing a particular word) reduce to physiological tokens, but psychological classes (e.g., the belief in general that it is raining) do not similarly reduce. As a result, while there is no need to resort to metaphysics, psychology remains necessary: according to Fodor (and I agree) one cannot even in principle reduce important psychological laws to physical ones.
The second discussion is one that Daniel Dennett repeated in a number of places, for example in Chapter 4 of "Consciousness Explained", essentially that explanation _should_ be "pitched" (as you put it) at different levels of analysis depending on the purpose of the explanation (essentially just the same argument that you make below). >Do you feel the same way about the difference between, say, "biological" > and "chemical." There's nothing wrong (IMHO) with pitching language at > different levels of analysis, as long as you don't bring along the > unnecessary assumption that there is something deeply metaphysical about > it. The most concise version of this in Dennett is in the chapter titled (oh-oh, here it comes...) "Skinner Skinned", in his "Brainstorms". The most important point is where Dennett writes "So if there is progress in pyschology , it will inevitably be, as Skinner suggests, in the direction of eliminating ultimate appeals to beliefs, desires, and other intentional items from our explanations. So far so good. But now Skinner appears to make an important misstep, for he seems to draw the further conclusion that intentional idioms therefore have no legitimate place in any psychological theory. But this has not been shown at all. There is no reason why intentional terms cannot be used provisionally in the effort to map out the functions of the behavior control system of men and animals, just so long as a way is found eventually to 'cash them out' by designing a mechanism to function as specified" (p. 61-62). Paul Smith Alverno College Milwaukee --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
