Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science (Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Science Book 17)

by William M.R. Simpson

The functional properties can be identified with the result of Ramseyfying ([Ramsey 1929]) our ordinary folk ontology and our special sciences (including, perhaps, classical mechanics) in the language of pure quantum-mechanics (infinite Hilbert space, unitary Schrödinger evolution). There are three historical precursors to the kind of functionalization of the manifest image that Wallace has in mind: the phenomenalistic project, as typified by John Stuart Mill and the early Carnap, Bertrand Russell’s functional-structural account of physics in The Analysis of Matter [Russell 1927], and the late-20th-century, behaviorism-inspired accounts of the mind, especially the Analytic Functionalism of David Lewis [Lewis 1966, 1972, 1980]. The ideal formal machinery for each attempted functional reduction is F. P. Ramsey’s account of scientific theories [Ramsey 1929], well explained by Lewis in Lewis 1972.