I’m under the impression that the difference between reductionism and postreductionism or rationalism and postrationalism, for that matter, is not in the realm of ideas but more like political affiliations and aesthetics.
Things you’ve said about the usefulness of multi-level models isn’t something reductionists disagree with. There is no crux here so I don’t really see an opportunity for the genuine crisis of faith. Could you explicitly state a couple of object-level beliefs you had previously when you identified as reductionist and the corresponding ones, that you have now as postreductionist, so that I could see the difference?
The procedure where you keep steelmanning and sanewashing someone’s argument to the point where they start making sense is a bit questionable. I can see potential use cases, like when you exist in adversarial epistemic conditions with highly polarized social bubbles, and every argument of the other side arrives to you distorted to be weak and crazy. Then doing your best to find a reasonable sounding version of the argument and try to check whether it was its original form from someone who actually holds this view is a good idea. But what you seem to have done—isn’t that.
The way I see it, you’ve distorted the original ontological argument, turning it into a methodological one. The new version of the argument makes sense, it can be a valid critique of some behaviour patterns inside the community. But this isn’t what the author of the argument originally meant! You try to find some common ground and when you can’t, you keep misrepresenting his views to yourself until you can find the common ground with this misrepresented version. I guess as a result, you are reading a much more interesting and nuanced book then the author wrote. And most credit for that should go to you, not the author.
I’m under the impression that the difference between reductionism and postreductionism or rationalism and postrationalism, for that matter, is not in the realm of ideas but more like political affiliations and aesthetics.
Things you’ve said about the usefulness of multi-level models isn’t something reductionists disagree with. There is no crux here so I don’t really see an opportunity for the genuine crisis of faith. Could you explicitly state a couple of object-level beliefs you had previously when you identified as reductionist and the corresponding ones, that you have now as postreductionist, so that I could see the difference?
The procedure where you keep steelmanning and sanewashing someone’s argument to the point where they start making sense is a bit questionable. I can see potential use cases, like when you exist in adversarial epistemic conditions with highly polarized social bubbles, and every argument of the other side arrives to you distorted to be weak and crazy. Then doing your best to find a reasonable sounding version of the argument and try to check whether it was its original form from someone who actually holds this view is a good idea. But what you seem to have done—isn’t that.
The way I see it, you’ve distorted the original ontological argument, turning it into a methodological one. The new version of the argument makes sense, it can be a valid critique of some behaviour patterns inside the community. But this isn’t what the author of the argument originally meant! You try to find some common ground and when you can’t, you keep misrepresenting his views to yourself until you can find the common ground with this misrepresented version. I guess as a result, you are reading a much more interesting and nuanced book then the author wrote. And most credit for that should go to you, not the author.