Definition, Meaning, Synonyms & Anagrams | English word REDUCTIONISM

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Definitions of REDUCTIONISM

1. An approach to studying complex systems or ideas by reducing them to a set of simpler components.
2. (philosophy) A philosophical position which holds 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. In a reductionist framework, the phenomena that can be explained completely in terms of relations between other more fundamental phenomena, are called "epiphenomena".

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Examples of Using REDUCTIONISM in a Sentence

• Reductionism is any of several related philosophical ideas regarding the associations between phenomena which can be described in terms of simpler or more fundamental phenomena.
• Genetic reductionism is a similar concept, but it is distinct from genetic determinism in that the former refers to the level of understanding, while the latter refers to the supposed causal role of genes.
• He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism, finding Cartesian analysis and other types of reductionism impractical to human life, and he was an apologist for classical antiquity and the Renaissance humanities, in addition to being the first expositor of the fundamentals of social science and of semiotics.
• It contains a wide array of political and non-political themes, such as mass incarceration, the CIA, the environment, police brutality, drug addiction, scientific reductionism, and groupies.
• Greedy reductionism, identified by Daniel Dennett, in his 1995 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, is a kind of erroneous reductionism.
• Emergentism is underpinned by several core principles that define its theoretical framework and distinguish it from other philosophical doctrines such as reductionism and holism.
• Midgley strongly opposed reductionism and scientism, and argued against any attempt to make science a substitute for the humanities.
• According to Bronfenbrenner, LaRouche viewed conventional economics as a "withered arm of philosophy", which had taken a wrong turn toward reductionism under the influence of British empiricists such as John Locke and David Hume.
• Since the turn of the 20th century, positivism, although still popular, has declined under criticism within the social sciences by antipositivists and critical theorists, among others, for its alleged scientism, reductionism, overgeneralizations, and methodological limitations.
• According to Madison, Merleau-Ponty sought to respond in his later work to the charge that by grounding all intellectual and cultural acquisitions in the prereflective and prepersonal life of the body, he was promoting reductionism and anti-intellectualism and undermining the ideals of reason and truth.
• It focuses on the identity of the human subject, multiculturalism, feminism, and human relationships to deal with the concepts of "difference" and "otherness" without essentialism or reductionism, but its contributions are not always appreciated (Carrington: 1998).
• His pictures are not snapshots but elaborate segmentations of surfaces, subtle studies of materials, colors, structures and light, sometimes resembling monochromies in their radical reductionism.
• "Darwin, Social Theory, and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge"; "Physicalism without Reductionism: Toward a Scientifically, Philosophically, and Theologically Sound Portrait of Human Nature"; and "Theology and Science within a Lakatosian Program," Zygon, December.
• For Taussig, this very reduction of the Other is suspect in itself, and through Mimesis and Alterity, he argues from both sides, demonstrating why exactly anthropologists have come to reduce the Cuna culture in this way, and the value of this perspective, at the same time as defending the independence of lived culture from Anthropological reductionism.
• Lyotard criticizes metanarratives such as reductionism and teleological notions of human history such as those of the Enlightenment and Marxism, arguing that they have become untenable because of technological progress in the areas of communication, mass media and computer science.
• Gould reproves Wilson's program of reductionism by utilizing two main arguments based upon the emergence and contingency or randomness found in some complex, nonlinear or non-additive systems.
• Guenther, Herbert (1989) From Reductionism to Creativity: rDzogs-chen and the New Sciences of Mind, (Shambhala, 1989).
• In 1997, Gerald Larson of Indiana University wrote that Kripal's book lacked balance and proper contextualization, and considered that it fell into the trap of monocausal reductionism.
• Relational organization throws away the matter; "function dictates structure", hence material aspects are entailed, while in reductionism the causal nexus between structure and dynamics entails function that obviates functional integration because the causal entailment in the brain of hierarchical integration is absent from the structure.
• Although he too occasionally adopts this reductionist view of political psychology in his work, he has also raised the contrarian possibility in numerous articles and chapters that reductionism sometimes runs in reverse—and that psychological research is often driven by ideological agenda (of which the psychologists often seem to be only partly conscious).
• Will Self, reviewing Militant Modernism and A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain in the London Review of Books, describes the latter as "engaging and even stimulating", but argues that Hatherley fails to accept the deep-seated and philoprogenitive bad taste of the masses, instead favouring an ethic shaped by urban reductionism.
• Nagel's discussions of reductionism and holism and teleological and non-teleological explanations have been praised by Hofstadter, while his discussion of the "dispute over the nature of theories and theoretical terms" has been praised by Scruton.
• Post-Marxism is a perspective in critical social theory which radically reinterprets Marxism, countering its association with economism, historical determinism, anti-humanism, and class reductionism, whilst remaining committed to the construction of socialism.
• Rather than demote the mind to biological reductionism, unconscious processes are conceived as a series of psychic spacings that instantiate themselves through a multitude of schemata, which are the building blocks of psychic reality.
• The main focus of the text is to demonstrate the possibility of a universalizing theory without reliance on Eurocentrism or reductionism.

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