Reductionist thinking

Finally, reductionism can refer to an attitude toward science, an attitude that I term the hup-two-three school. Reductionists think that we can actually make progress in science. No problem is, in principle, impossible to solve. Perhaps we cannot solve it now, it looks too complicated, but if we only work harder, we can solve it. Anti-reductionists disagree. Some phenomena are simply too complicated to understand from a reductionistic perspective or by using reductionist methods. If these phenomena are to be understood at all, they will have to be understood from a more holistic perspective. In this connection, anti-reductionists view reductionists as Philistines. Reductionists simply do not understand the scope, depth and complexity of the phenomena that they are investigating. 

Davidson believes that to move green engineering forward, engineers need to go beyond reductionist thinking, where each part of a complex system is considered separately—emphasize the emergent properties of the whole. The skills and attitudes future engineers will need are ... 

If they fixate on their difficulties with the child, they are in danger of getting into reductionist thinking ... 

Stan Shostak Just one moment, about metaphor and analogy. I think those are the diagnostic characteristics of reductionism. As soon as you find metaphor and analogy-this morning we heard the word machine , the cell machine, and I m sure you didn t intend it in any way to be reductionist, but that s how you know it s there. 

John Dupre Or you d explain human behaviour in terms of the interactions of brain cells. The opposite, downward causation, would be, for example, to say that the behaviour of a person causes their brain cells to move in a certain way. Lisa s example today, I take to be, as she just summarised it, precisely a claim to downward causation. That is to say that the social phenomena actually act causally on the individual, and, of course, to deny what is a very common thesis in the philosophy of social phenomena, which is methodological individualism, which says, and many people, social scientists and philosophers have said - you have to be able to explain social phenomena by looking at the behaviour of individuals. And that s the reductionist view as opposed to the downward causation view, which is an anti-reductionist view. And I think that s certainly one of the standard ways philosophers have understood the debate. 

However, I also think that scientists working at the upper levels need to adopt a bit more of the hup-two-three attitude of the reductionists natural phenomena at the upper levels of organization can be explained. Scientists should be only selectively sophisticated. One of the great dangers in science is becoming so sophisticated that you can shoot down any new idea before anyone can develop it. Read the New York Review of Books if you must, but then come back down to do more plebian science. Too much sophistication can ruin otherwise excellent scientists. 

The scientific and philosophical problems of such reductionist claims have been extensively debated.6 This paper will not deal with questions of scientific validity, but rather with some of the policy implications and applications of reductionist modes of thinking about the body and behavior. 

Stanley Shostak I m reminded of Huxley s response to Wilberforce. You ve used your enormous intellect to reduce the subject to humour. I object, and I think we have a very serious crisis in our culture, and while we might find it amusing it s going to be devastating unless we have an alternative. So let me be reductionist for a moment and remind you that in Code of Codes Watson explains that he appealed to Congress for support because he knew that the politicians wanted to be able to advertise that they... 

Lisa Lloyd I disagree with what Professor Williams just said. I think that every time you use the word reductionist , I would have used analysis . I think that it is correct that scientists use analysis to break systems down, but I think of reductionism as being something else which is the complete description of entire systems in terms of entities at a lower level. That s the sort of standard philosophical definition of reductionism which has a lot more metaphysical and epistemological bite than does the kind of analytic method that you are describing. So I would want to distinguish between analysis as a method, a set of approaches that all scientists do use, and reductionism as a set of commitments about what the ultimate aims of science or of a scientific theory would be, which is explanation at the lowest possible level. Does that make sense to you ... 

Bob Williams As a scientist I would say, that as far as reductionism is concerned, we could think how far physics has got. Now physicists would say that given the Big Bang at a tenth of minus fiftieth of a second, they can come all the way forward to the present time as far as most dead things are concerned, and they ve achieved that conclusion over a very long period of time. I don t know how far this reductionist game will go as far as living things are concerned. What I worry about is, if I am not allowed to say that all the scientific activity is in some way reductionist, what does holistic research mean. What is it exactly If somebody could answer what is holistic research, I would be very interested. 

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