Reduction, Levels of Analysis, and the Contributions of Diachronic Theories about Long Term Processes in Cross-Scientific Settings

1. Introduction The New Wave models of reduction in science incorporate the best insights of both the logical empiricists and their critics. They propose that cases of intertheoretic mapping can fall anywhere along a continuum of possibilities from nearly perfect isomorphs at one end of that continuum (which the logical empiricists tended to stress) to utterly irreconcilable conceptions at the other (which Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn so famously highlighted). The New Wavers have also drawn our attention to the fact that what is surely a majority of cases fall somewhere between their continuum's two extremes (Endicott (2007). remain blunt instruments for analyzing cross-scientific relations. Like the logical empiricists before them, they (1) offer an all-purpose, "one size fits all" model of intertheoretic relations in science and (2) presume that an account of the structural relations of scientific theories' explanatory principles (e.g., laws), and the things that theories describe exhausts what is of ontological and epistemological interest in such scientific comparisons. Consequently, their proposals tend to minimize some of the most epistemologically significant features of the relevant sorts of scientific research, and they fail to discriminate between different classes of intertheoretic relations in science.