reductive explanation is not the be-all and end-all of explanation. Its chief role is to remove any deep sense of mystery surrounding a high-level phenomenon. It does this by reducing the bruteness and arbitrariness of the phenomenon in question to the bruteness and arbitrariness of lower-level processes. Insofar as the low-level processes may themselves be quite brute and arbitrary, a reductive explanation may not give us a deep understanding of a phenomenon, but it at least eliminates any sense that there is something “extra” going on.
