Abstract
Eliminativism about levels is an over-reaction to a real problem that demands instead principled pluralism. Levels eliminativism is motivated in part by the recognition of systematic failures of entailment between seemingly related but distinct ways of talking about levels. Levels pluralism, in contrast to eliminativism and to a facile, “anything goes” attitude, recognizes the distinct roles that, as Havstad calls it “leveling,” plays in the context of different intellectual practices and pursuits. After clarifying what I mean by saying that level talk is metaphorical, I suggest some basic questions (the relata, relations, and placement questions) that can help to diagnose the sense of level at play in the context of distinct scientific and philosophical. As incremental progress toward that end, I distinguish contexts of practice involved in explaining natural phenomena (levels of organization), in describing a system from different vantage points (e.g., Marr’s levels; the personal-sub-personal distinction), and in describing clusters of scientific activity directed at items in a given size scale (call these Feynman levels). I show that the sense of level in each of these distinct contexts a) plays a useful scientific role (with the possible exception of Feynman levels, as I’ll explain), and b) answers the relata, relations, and placement questions differently. This not only stands as a display of the sort of pluralism in the levels metaphor we find operating in science and philosophy (itself a curious social/psychological phenomenon) but recommends significant caution against running these constructs together.
