238 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1964 



mean that an electrician could make a complete catalog of all that is 

 there, and have nothing left over, without mentioning "the advertise- 

 ment." This is true. (2) Or I may mean that since there is nothing 

 left over from the electrician's account, there isn't really an advertise- 

 ment there at all. This is the error of reductionism. It consists in 

 confusing exhaustiveness with exclusiveness. The electrician's ac- 

 count is exhaustive, at least in the sense that a perfect replica could be 

 constructed from it. But the electrician's account and the advertiser's 

 account of "all that is there" are not mutually exclusive. The adver- 

 tisement is not something to be fitted into a gap in the electrician's 

 account. It is something that we find when we start all over again to 

 describe what is there in another complementary language. 



It is not even possible to defend reductionism by the principle of 

 Ockham's Razor, for this refers to a choice between alternative descrip- 

 tions in the same language system, and not to a choice between 

 descriptions in alternative language systems. 



I suggest, then, that to try to find gaps for "my decision" in the 

 physical chain of events in my brain is like trying to find gaps for "the 

 advertisement" in the electrical description of the sign. "My decision" 

 should find no place because it belongs to a different language, defined 

 not from the observer's but from the actor's standpoint. There may 

 w^ell be links in the physical chain which have a certain margin of in- 

 determinacy ; but merely on linguistic grounds it would seem absurd 

 to seek to fit "my decision" into what gaps they provide. "My deci- 

 sion" is surely rather my description from my standpoint of the whole 

 pattern of activity, determinate and indeterminate. 



It is not because I believe my brain to work indeterministically that 

 I judge myself to be responsible. On the contrary, the more physically 

 reliable my brain is, the less excuse I have from my responsibility. 

 There is an unpredictability that goes with my responsibility, but that 

 is something different. It is the unpredictability to you of what I 

 shall do if you offer me your prediction. As a little thought will show, 

 you would never be able to cope with this by allowing for the effect of 

 your prediction on me, since I should always be one jump ahead of the 

 data on which you could base your revised prediction. 



To sum up, I believe most seriously that man is "more than" the 

 physical organism which we can describe in observer language. But I 

 believe that this implies not necessarily that there must be gaps in the 

 physical account of his activity, but that he has other aspects that are 

 revealed only by using another complementary language to describe 

 the same activity, which in its full nature transcends and combines 

 what can be said in both. 



To explore the implications of this complementarity may throw 

 some light on the age-old paradox that though we are but dust, we are 



