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Levels: Descriptive, Explanatory, and Ontological
Author(s) -
List Christian
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
noûs
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.574
H-Index - 66
eISSN - 1468-0068
pISSN - 0029-4624
DOI - 10.1111/nous.12241
Subject(s) - supervenience , physicalism , normative , hierarchy , epistemology , terminology , salient , ontology , subject (documents) , computer science , metaphysics , linguistics , philosophy , artificial intelligence , library science , economics , market economy
Abstract Scientists and philosophers frequently speak about levels of description, levels of explanation, and ontological levels. In this paper, I propose a unified framework for modelling levels. I give a general definition of a system of levels and show that it can accommodate descriptive, explanatory, and ontological notions of levels. I further illustrate the usefulness of this framework by applying it to some salient philosophical questions: (1) Is there a linear hierarchy of levels, with a fundamental level at the bottom? And what does the answer to this question imply for physicalism, the thesis that everything supervenes on the physical? (2) Are there emergent properties? (3) Are higher‐level descriptions reducible to lower‐level ones? (4) Can the relationship between normative and non‐normative domains be viewed as one involving levels? Although I use the terminology of “levels”, the proposed framework can also represent “scales”, “domains”, or “subject matters”, where these are not linearly but only partially ordered by relations of supervenience or inclusion.