Reductionism promises that all ontologies can become one. More formally: Given any finite set of ontologies that fit experience, there’s some super-ontology that fits experience and is at least as rich as every ontology in your initial set
Reductionism doesn’t work like category theory, where everything relates to everything else, without any thing being special or fundamental.
It’s not just the promise that all maps can be related together, somehow, it’s the expectation that the resulting superstructure will be an inverted pyramid with fundamental physics at the bottom.
It doesn’t have to work, it can be stymied in various ways, and one of the ways it can be stymied is if one cannot establish truth beyond usefulness.
Reductionism doesn’t work like category theory, where everything relates to everything else, without any thing being special or fundamental.
It’s not just the promise that all maps can be related together, somehow, it’s the expectation that the resulting superstructure will be an inverted pyramid with fundamental physics at the bottom.
It doesn’t have to work, it can be stymied in various ways, and one of the ways it can be stymied is if one cannot establish truth beyond usefulness.