From the marine parks thread:

http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1192441509/222#222

Quote:


PJ keeps insisting that he has established that my argument is somehow greedy reductionism. But he has merely insisted it repeatedly without being able to justify the claim, as an excuse for not being able to counter my arguments. I even went to the trouble of posting a definition of greedy reductionism and pointed out that my arguments do not fit the definition.

Please explain it all for us here PJ.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_reductionism

Greedy reductionism is a term coined by Daniel Dennett, in the book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, to distinguish between what he considers acceptable and erroneous forms of reductionism. Whereas reductionism means explaining a thing in terms of what it reduces to, greedy reductionism arises when the thing we are trying to understand is explained away instead of explained, so that we fail to gain any additional understanding of the original target.

For example, we can reduce temperature to average kinetic energy without denying that temperature exists, so this is good reductionism. In contrast, when we consider the question of why clicking on a hyperlink takes us to one website and not another, any answer that says that it all comes down to electrons and that hyperlinks don't really exist is a greedy attempt to explain away the problem without solving it.

You didn't counter my arguments. You called them greedy reductionism because you couldn't counter them. Now you can't even show that they are greedy reductionism.

This is far simpler than science. This is a simple diversionary tactic. You couldn't counter my actual arguments, and greedy reductionism was your excuse for not doing so.

If you aren't going to explain the alleged greedy reductionism (which you haven't managed yet), why even respond to this thread? You are just digging yourself deeper into a hole.

Maybe you just shouldn't use big terms like this if you can't back it up.