Posted by Kenneth Anderson:
Four Modes of Reductionist Explanation:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_08_16-2009_08_22.shtml#1250979499
Over at Asymmetrical Information, [1]Megan McArdle posts an email from
a reader responding to a series of posts on the causes and solutions
of obesity. The email is bracing and provocative, written from my home
town of LA; here is a bit of the email to McArdle:
As someone who works in the entertainment industry in Los
Angeles--land of the perfect body--I totally agree that government
pressure will do nothing to make people lose weight. People will
only give up one pleasure in exchange for a more intense pleasure.
And if you're poor and miserable, and eating is the high point of
your life, you'll always reach for the cheetos.
I suspect the only way people will change their behavior is a
sudden desire to move up the social ladder. Being thin and
attractive gives you a competitive edge, especially if you live in
a city with lots of talented people. The moment someone I know
suddenly gets ambitious, or makes partner, or needs investors, they
start losing weight. In California, being fat will hurt any career,
whether you're a doctor, lawyer or accountant. We all take our cues
from television/movie industry and the message is clear: you must
be sexually appealing, no matter what you do. And so we tune out
the Dominos commercials and reach for the tuna. Thank God for
sushi, or we'd all go crazy.
No one I know is starving, but no one is ever full ...
I'm not quoting this for the substance here or even for the topic of
(anti-) obesity as public policy. Rather, I was struck by the first
four comments on the post. With a little free interpretation, they
offer an intriguing, accidental, array of the forms of explanation
that are currently on intellectual offer in our culture more broadly.
Not comprehensive, I'm sure, and I have applied some interpetive
arm-twisting. But consider (and I'm not picking on people here; all of
us engage in most of these forms of explanation freely, and not
necessarily inaccurately by any means):
Comment One: The Political. Granted, it is via a skeptical view.
Freely restated, it says (more or less): California can't politically
govern itself, so why should anyone pay attention to its views on
obesity and thinness? I'll take that as a sort of negative political
explanation; if it could politically govern itself, then we might have
reason to pay attention to what it thinks is the way to combat
obesity.
Comment Two: The Cultural. Citing to Virginia Postrel's excellent book
on this topic, and the theme of which is, "smart is good, smart and
pretty are better."
Comment Three: The Biological. And specifically, the biologically,
evolutionarily hardwired - overcoming obesity in LA requires finding a
pleasure more intense than eating. Though this comment mingles quickly
- as happens in real life too - into the Cultural, because the
pleasures that are more intense than eating are not merely physical,
but cultural and social - fame, glory, etc., not just sex and mating.
Comment Four: The Economic. And specifically financial - an
explanation from the discounted value of future pleasures and, in
effect, a NPV of eat-now-to-obesity versus all the other great things
LA has to offer provided one stays thin into the future.
I suppose it is in the nature of explanation that, methodologically at
least, it strives to be simpler than the phenomenon being explained -
Occam's Razor and all that. But there is no a priori reason why that
should be the case, and often - as medicine, chemistry, physics, and
other physical sciences have shown over the ages - the actual
explanation is unimaginably complex. But these comments illustrate a
general tendency toward certain well-trod paths these days toward
reductionism. I share it - and I bet you do too. It is far from being
a bad thing, of course, provided we keep the limits of reduction
methodologically in bounds. We share a desire to model potentially
complicated things with simple systems that, true, have often served
well in other matters. But when I look at actual science of so many
things, actual explanations are fantastically complicated and
overlapping, not really reductionist at all.
References
1. http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/08/thinking_thin_1.php
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