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Heresy

Pluralism: The Many Maps Model

Mary Midgley says that branches of knowledge are like maps – each answers a different set of questions so they can’t necessarily all be ‘reduced’ to physics.

Reductivism comes in two phases. First there is the monistic move where we explain a great range of things as only aspects of a single basic stuff. Thus, Thales says that all the four elements are really just water. Again, Nietzsche says that all motives are really just forms of the will to power, and Hobbes says that mind and matter are both really just matter. Second, there can follow the atomistic move – made by Democritus and also by the seventeenth-century physicists – which is slightly different.

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