We did our best to trounce a certain excrementitious version
of ultra-reductionism, that of those known as "eliminativists" (nomen omen), here:
By way of afternote, or pousse-café, these tidbits:
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
(1979), p. 373:
The wholehearted behaviorism,
naturalism, and physicalism I have been commending in earlier chapters help us avoid the self-deception of
thinking that we possess a deep, hidden, metaphysically significant nature which makes us ‘irreducibly’ different
from inkwells or atoms.
To which we can only reply (after mature reflection): Bite Me.
~
I wield this term proctoscopists
as a handy epithet of hearty abuse, wherewith to belabor the shoulders of those who deserve it:
but it some cases it turns out to be eerily accurate. For the ineffable Norman “O.” Brown, “all
thinking comes from anal erotism”, reports Frederick Crews in a painstaking essay, reprinted
in Out of My System (1975),
p. 29. (This previously
best-selling author and cult figure is seldom referred to simply as "Norman
Brown", but invariably with that unexplained “O” in the middle. What it stands for is never made
clear; presumably it represents a
sphincter.)
[That same volume reprints an excellent essay distinguishing
the (good) reductive from the (bad) reductionistic, in literary criticism, “Reductionism
and its Discontents”.]
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