Reductionism (philosophy)
Reductionism in philosophy is the concept that complex systems can be understood entirely in terms of their simpler, constituent parts. This perspective suggests that everything in existence can be categorized as a combination of more basic entities, with complex phenomena reducible to the behaviors and interactions of these simpler components. Reductionism is often contrasted with holism, which emphasizes understanding systems as integrated wholes, and emergentism, which posits that complex properties arise that cannot be fully explained by their simpler parts. Historically, reductionist ideas trace back to ancient philosophers like Aristotle and were further developed during the Enlightenment by thinkers such as René Descartes and Isaac Newton, who viewed the universe as a machine that could be analyzed by studying its individual parts.
Philosophers distinguish between several forms of reductionism, including ontological reductionism, which addresses the nature of reality, and methodological reductionism, which advocates for scientific inquiry to focus on the smallest entities. Contemporary debates in reductionism often revolve around its application in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind, with many modern reductionists asserting a commitment to materialism. While reductionism has significantly influenced scientific disciplines such as physics and biology, it remains a contested framework, with ongoing discussions about its limitations and the nature of scientific explanations.
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Reductionism (philosophy)
In philosophy, reductionism is the position asserting that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents. Thus, everything that exists is a collection or combination of entities of a simpler or more basic kind, and expressions denoting such entities are definable in terms of expression, denoting the more basic entities. Philosophers use the term reduction to designate relations of particular philosophical importance in a number of closely related fields, especially in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. The philosophical reductionist position opposes holism (systems should be viewed as wholes, not a collection of entities), emergentism (belief in emergence, particularly as it involves consciousness and philosophy of mind), and vitalism (living organisms are governed by different principles than are inanimate things).
Background
The origins of reductionism are usually associated with the Age of Enlightenment, but they can be traced back to antiquity. While attempting to create a framework for a logical comprehension of the universe, Aristotle presented his Principle of Non-Contradiction in his work, Metaphysics (c. 350 BCE), inspired by earlier theories of Protagoras, Parmenides, and Socrates. The ontological version of this principle is that it is impossible for the same thing to belong and not belong to the same thing at the same time and in the same respect. Aristotle uses this as an organizing paradigm for knowledge itself, and by using this principle, he asserted that all things can be divided into categories.
During the 1600s, major contributions to the topic were brought by René Descartes and Isaac Newton. Descartes added the idea that intuition should be doubted, and instead, one should reason only from established facts and pure deduction. His belief in the simple mechanistic nature of the world led him to promote the idea of dualism, where the source of free will was somehow external to the mechanism of the body. In Part V of his Discourses (1637), he argued the world was like a machine, its pieces like clockwork mechanisms, and that the machine could be understood by taking its pieces apart, studying them, and then putting them back together to see the larger picture.
Newton developed Descartes’s idea by stating that complex phenomena are based on fundamental, simple laws, a fascinating suggestion that was reinforced by discoveries made in various scientific fields. In the nineteenth century, some phenomena, like turbulence, were believed to be caused by a disruption of the normal rules, which was an oversimplification of phenomena. The limits of reductionism were considered only during the twentieth century with the works of Karl Popper and the emergence of chaos theory, which showed that regular and repetitive interactions can produce complex and unexpected results. The history of philosophy presents many conflicts between reductionist views and their dualist and pluralist rivals, the classical debate between materialism and mind-body dualism being only the most visible.
Overview
There are controversies related to the types of reductionism philosophers are willing to recognize, but some of them are constantly made the object of their discourses. The first one is ontological reductionism, which claims that reality is composed of a minimum number of kinds of entities or substances. This is a metaphysical claim, commonly suggesting that all objects, properties, and events can be reduced to a single substance, although a dualist who is also an ontological reductionist would believe that everything is reducible to two substances (e.g., matter and spirit). The second type is methodological reductionism, or the position that the best scientific strategy is to reduce evidence to the smallest possible entities. A third type would be theory reduction, which refers to the process by which one theory absorbs another. Another type is epistemological reductionism, or the theory that a complex system and all phenomena can be completely understood in terms of the behavior of micro-physical entities.
In general, reductionist philosophers in the twentieth century were divided between two very general forms of reductionism: logical positivism and unity of science. If logical positivists have maintained that expressions referring to existing things or to states of affairs are definable in terms of directly observable objects and that any statement of fact is equivalent to some set of empirically verifiable statements, the scientific laws being combinations of observation reports, the partisans of the unity of science have held the position that the theoretical entities of particular sciences, such as biology or psychology, are definable in terms of those of some more basic science, such as physics. The logical positivist version of reductionism also implies that the unity of science, insofar as the definability of the theoretical entities of the various sciences in terms of the observable, would constitute the common basis of all scientific laws. Although this version of reductionism is no longer widely accepted, primarily because of the difficulty of giving a satisfactory characterization of the distinction between theoretical and observational statements in science, the question of the reducibility of one science to another remains controversial. In the twenty-first century, the type of reductionism that is of interest is in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. It involves the claim that all sciences are reducible to physics.
Most contemporary reductionists include some commitment to materialism or physicalism (the view that the physical or material provides the fundamental reductive base). They are also generally committed to the reality of the reducing base, and their views are, in that respect, conservative. Some reductionists take, however, a more anti-realist view. Two closely related lines of debate have focused on the nature of reduction, one within the philosophy of science and the other within the philosophy of mind. Reductionism forms the basis for many of the well-developed areas of modern science, including physics, chemistry, and cell biology, with classical mechanics, in particular, being seen as a reductionist framework. Philosophers of science have proposed several explications of the notion of reduction, often aiming for broader conceptions of explanation, scientific change, and unification. Philosophers of mind concerned with specific questions about whether the mental is just physiological or physical in nature have asked what notions of reduction might be relevant and how they might apply to particular cases in psychology and neuroscience.
Bibliography
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