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Reductionism

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Not to be confused with thereductionistexperimental music genre.
For term used phenomenological tradition in Western philosophy, seephenomenological reduction.

Reductionismis any of several relatedphilosophicalideas regarding the associations betweenphenomenawhich can be described in terms of simpler or more fundamental phenomena.[1]It is also described as an intellectual and philosophical position that interprets acomplex systemas the sum of its parts.[2]

René Descartes,inDe homine(1662), claimed that non-human animals could be explained reductively asautomata;meaning essentially as more mechanically complex versions of thisDigesting Duck.

Definitions

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The Oxford Companion to Philosophysuggests that reductionism is "one of the most used and abused terms in the philosophical lexicon" and suggests a three-part division:[3]

  1. Ontological reductionism:a belief that the whole of reality consists of a minimal number of parts.
  2. Methodological reductionism:the scientific attempt to provide an explanation in terms of ever-smaller entities.
  3. Theory reductionism:the suggestion that a newer theory does not replace or absorb an older one, but reduces it to more basic terms. Theory reduction itself is divisible into three parts: translation, derivation, and explanation.[4]

Reductionism can be applied to anyphenomenon,includingobjects,problems,explanations,theories,and meanings.[4][5][6]

For the sciences, application of methodological reductionism attempts explanation of entire systems in terms of their individual, constituent parts and their interactions. For example, the temperature of a gas is reduced to nothing beyond the average kinetic energy of its molecules in motion.Thomas Nageland others speak of 'psychophysical reductionism' (the attempted reduction of psychological phenomena to physics and chemistry), and 'physico-chemical reductionism' (the attempted reduction of biology to physics and chemistry).[7]In a very simplified and sometimes contested form, reductionism is said to imply that a system is nothing but the sum of its parts.[5][8]

However, a more nuanced opinion is that a system is composed entirely of its parts, but the system will have features that none of the parts have (which, in essence is the basis ofemergentism).[9]"The point of mechanistic explanations is usually showing how the higher level features arise from the parts."[8]

Other definitions are used by other authors. For example, whatJohn Polkinghorneterms 'conceptual' or 'epistemological' reductionism[5]is the definition provided bySimon Blackburn[10]and byJaegwon Kim:[11]that form of reductionism which concerns a program of replacing the facts or entities involved in one type of discourse with other facts or entities from another type, thereby providing a relationship between them. Richard Jones distinguishes ontological and epistemological reductionism, arguing that many ontological and epistemological reductionists affirm the need for different concepts for different degrees of complexity while affirming a reduction of theories.[9]

The idea of reductionism can be expressed by "levels" of explanation, with higher levels reducible if need be to lower levels. This use of levels of understanding in part expresses our human limitations in remembering detail. However, "most philosophers would insist that our role in conceptualizing reality [our need for a hierarchy of" levels "of understanding] does not change the fact that different levels of organization in reality do have different 'properties'."[9]

Reductionism does not preclude the existence of what might be termedemergent phenomena,but it does imply the ability to understand those phenomena completely in terms of the processes from which they are composed. This reductionist understanding is very different from ontological or strongemergentism,which intends that what emerges in "emergence" is more than the sum of the processes from which it emerges, respectively either in the ontological sense or in the epistemological sense.[12]

Ontological reductionism

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Richard Jones divides ontological reductionism into two: the reductionism of substances (e.g., the reduction of mind to matter) and the reduction of the number of structures operating in nature (e.g., the reduction of one physical force to another). This permits scientists and philosophers to affirm the former while being anti-reductionists regarding the latter.[13]

Nancey Murphyhas claimed that there are two species of ontological reductionism: one that claims that wholes are nothing more than their parts; and atomist reductionism, claiming that wholes are not "really real". She admits that the phrase "really real" is apparently senseless but she has tried to explicate the supposed difference between the two.[14]

Ontological reductionism denies the idea of ontologicalemergence,and claims that emergence is anepistemologicalphenomenon that only exists through analysis or description of a system, and does not exist fundamentally.[15]

In some scientific disciplines, ontological reductionism takes two forms:token-identity theoryandtype-identity theory.[16]In this case, "token" refers to a biological process.[17]

Token ontological reductionism is the idea that every item that exists is a sum item. For perceivable items, it affirms that every perceivable item is a sum of items with a lesser degree of complexity. Token ontological reduction of biological things to chemical things is generally accepted.

Type ontological reductionism is the idea that every type of item is a sum type of item, and that every perceivable type of item is a sum of types of items with a lesser degree of complexity. Type ontological reduction of biological things to chemical things is often rejected.

Michael Rusehas criticized ontological reductionism as an improper argument againstvitalism.[18]

Methodological reductionism

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In a biological context, methodological reductionism means attempting to explain all biological phenomena in terms of their underlying biochemical and molecular processes.[19]

In religion

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AnthropologistsEdward Burnett TylorandJames George Frazeremployed somereligious reductionist arguments.[20]

Theory reductionism

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Theory reduction is the process by which a more general theory absorbs a special theory.[2]It can be further divided into translation, derivation, and explanation.[21]For example, bothKepler'slaws of the motion of theplanetsandGalileo's theories of motion formulated for terrestrial objects are reducible to Newtonian theories of mechanics because all the explanatory power of the former are contained within the latter. Furthermore, the reduction is considered beneficial becauseNewtonian mechanicsis a more general theory—that is, it explains more events than Galileo's or Kepler's. Besides scientific theories, theory reduction more generally can be the process by which one explanation subsumes another.

In mathematics

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Inmathematics,reductionism can be interpreted as the philosophy that all mathematics can (or ought to) be based on a common foundation, which for modern mathematics is usuallyaxiomatic set theory.Ernst Zermelowas one of the major advocates of such an opinion; he also developed much of axiomatic set theory. It has been argued that the generally accepted method of justifying mathematicalaxiomsby their usefulness in common practice can potentially weaken Zermelo's reductionist claim.[22]

Jouko Väänänen has argued forsecond-order logicas a foundation for mathematics instead of set theory,[23]whereas others have argued forcategory theoryas a foundation for certain aspects of mathematics.[24][25]

Theincompleteness theoremsofKurt Gödel,published in 1931, caused doubt about the attainability of an axiomatic foundation for all of mathematics. Any such foundation would have to include axioms powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (a subset of all mathematics). Yet Gödel proved that, for anyconsistentrecursively enumerable axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers, there are (model-theoretically)truepropositions about the natural numbers that cannot be proved from the axioms. Such propositions are known as formallyundecidable propositions.For example, thecontinuum hypothesisis undecidable in theZermelo–Fraenkel set theoryas shown byCohen.

In science

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Reductionist thinking and methods form the basis for many of the well-developed topics of modernscience,including much ofphysics,chemistryandmolecular biology.Classical mechanicsin particular is seen as a reductionist framework. For instance, we understand the solar system in terms of its components (the sun and the planets) and their interactions.[26]Statistical mechanicscan be considered as a reconciliation ofmacroscopicthermodynamic lawswith the reductionist method of explaining macroscopic properties in terms ofmicroscopiccomponents, although it has been argued that reduction in physics 'never goes all the way in practice'.[27]

In computer science

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The role of reduction incomputer sciencecan be thought as a precise and unambiguous mathematical formalization of the philosophical idea of "theory reductionism".In a general sense, a problem (or set) is said to be reducible to another problem (or set), if there is a computable/feasible method to translate the questions of the former into the latter, so that, if one knows how to computably/feasibly solve the latter problem, then one can computably/feasibly solve the former. Thus, the latter can only be at least as"hard"to solve as the former.

Reduction intheoretical computer scienceis pervasive in both: the mathematical abstract foundations of computation; and in real-worldperformance or capability analysis of algorithms.More specifically, reduction is a foundational and central concept, not only in the realm of mathematical logic and abstract computation incomputability (or recursive) theory,where it assumes the form of e.g.Turing reduction,but also in the realm of real-world computation in time (or space) complexity analysis of algorithms, where it assumes the form of e.g.polynomial-time reduction.

Criticism

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Free will

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Main article:Free will

Philosophers of theEnlightenmentworked to insulate humanfree willfrom reductionism.Descartesseparated the material world of mechanical necessity from the world of mental free will. German philosophers introduced the concept of the "noumenal"realm that is not governed by the deterministic laws of"phenomenal"nature, where every event is completely determined by chains of causality.[28]The most influential formulation was byImmanuel Kant,who distinguished between the causal deterministic framework the mind imposes on the world—the phenomenal realm—and the world as it exists for itself, the noumenal realm, which, as he believed, included free will. To insulate theology from reductionism, 19th century post-Enlightenment German theologians, especiallyFriedrich SchleiermacherandAlbrecht Ritschl,used theRomanticmethod of basing religion on the human spirit, so that it is a person's feeling or sensibility about spiritual matters that comprises religion.[29]

Causation

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Most common philosophical understandings ofcausationinvolve reducing it to some collection of non-causal facts. Opponents of these reductionist views have given arguments that the non-causal facts in question are insufficient to determine the causal facts.[30]

Alfred North Whitehead's metaphysics opposed reductionism. He refers to this as the "fallacy of the misplaced concreteness".His scheme was to frame a rational, general understanding of phenomena, derived from our reality.

In science

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An alternative term for ontological reductionism isfragmentalism,[31]often used in apejorativesense.[32]Incognitive psychology,George Kellydeveloped "constructive alternativism" as a form ofpersonal construct psychologyand an alternative to what he considered "accumulative fragmentalism". For this theory, knowledge is seen as the construction of successfulmental modelsof the exterior world, rather than the accumulation of independent "nuggets of truth".[33]Others argue that inappropriate use of reductionism limits our understanding of complex systems. In particular, ecologistRobert Ulanowiczsays that science must develop techniques to study ways in which larger scales of organization influence smaller ones, and also ways in which feedback loops create structure at a given level, independently of details at a lower level of organization. He advocates and usesinformation theoryas a framework to studypropensitiesin natural systems.[34]The limits of the application of reductionism are claimed to be especially evident at levels of organization with greatercomplexity,including livingcells,[35]neural networks (biology),ecosystems,society,and other systems formed from assemblies of large numbers of diverse components linked by multiplefeedback loops.[35][36]

See also

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References

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  1. ^Wendy Doniger, ed. (1999)."Reductionism".Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of World Religions.Merriam-Webster. p.911.ISBN978-0877790440.
  2. ^abKricheldorf, Hans R. (2016).Getting It Right in Science and Medicine: Can Science Progress through Errors? Fallacies and Facts.Cham: Springer. p. 63.ISBN978-3319303864.
  3. ^Michael Ruse (2005)."Entry for" reductionism "".In Ted Honderich (ed.).The Oxford Companion to Philosophy(2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 793.ISBN978-0191037474.
  4. ^abAlyssa Ney."Reductionism".Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.IEP, University of Tennessee.RetrievedMarch 13,2015.
  5. ^abcJohn Polkinghorne (2002)."Reductionism".Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science.Advanced School for Interdisciplinary Research; Pontifical University of the Holy Cross.
  6. ^For reductionism referred toexplanations,theories,and meanings, seeWillard Van Orman Quine'sTwo Dogmas of Empiricism.Quine objected to thepositivistic,reductionist "belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience" as an intractable problem.
  7. ^Thomas Nagel (2012).Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.Oxford University Press. pp. 4–5.ISBN978-0199919758.
  8. ^abPeter Godfrey-Smith (2013).Philosophy of Biology.Princeton University Press. p. 16.ISBN978-1400850440.
  9. ^abcRichard H. Jones (2000)."Clarification of terminology".Reductionism: Analysis and the Fullness of Reality.Bucknell University Press. pp. 19– [27–28, 32].ISBN978-0838754399.
  10. ^Simon Blackburn (2005)."Entry on 'reductionism'".Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.Oxford University Press, UK. p. 311.ISBN978-0198610137.
  11. ^Jaegwon Kim (2005)."Entry for 'mental reductionism'".In Ted Honderich (ed.).The Oxford Companion to Philosophy(2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 794.ISBN978-0191037474.
  12. ^Axelrod and Cohen "Harnessing Complexity"
  13. ^Richard H. Jones (2000),Reductionism: Analysis and the Fullness of Reality,pp. 24—26, 29–31. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press.
  14. ^Nancey Murphy, "Reductionism and Emergence. A Critical Perspective." InHuman Identity at the Intersection of Science, Technology and Religion.Edited by Nancey Murphy, and Christopher C. Knight. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. P. 82.
  15. ^Silberstein, Michael; McGeever, John (April 1999)."The Search for Ontological Emergence".The Philosophical Quarterly.49(195): 201–214.doi:10.1111/1467-9213.00136.ISSN0031-8094.
  16. ^"Scientific Reduction".The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. 2019.
  17. ^"Reductionism in Biology".The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. 2022.
  18. ^Ruse, Michael (1989)."Do Organisms Exist?"(PDF).Am. Zool.29(3): 1061–1066.doi:10.1093/icb/29.3.1061.Archived fromthe original(PDF)on 2008-10-02.
  19. ^Brigandt, Ingo; Love, Alan (2017)."Reductionism in Biology".In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.).Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.Retrieved2019-04-28.
  20. ^Strenski, Ivan. "Classic Twentieth-Century Theorist of the Study of Religion: Defending the Inner Sanctum of Religious Experience or Storming It." pp. 176–209 inThinking About Religion: An Historical Introduction to Theories of Religion.Malden: Blackwell, 2006.
  21. ^"Reductionism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy".
  22. ^Taylor, R. Gregory (1993)."Zermelo, Reductionism, and the Philosophy of Mathematics".Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic.34(4): 539–563.doi:10.1305/ndjfl/1093633905.
  23. ^Väänänen, J. (2001). "Second-Order Logic and Foundations of Mathematics".Bulletin of Symbolic Logic.7(4): 504–520.doi:10.2307/2687796.JSTOR2687796.S2CID7465054.
  24. ^Awodey, S. (1996). "Structure in Mathematics and Logic: A Categorical Perspective".Philos. Math.Series III.4(3): 209–237.doi:10.1093/philmat/4.3.209.
  25. ^Lawvere, F. W. (1966). "The Category of Categories as a Foundation for Mathematics".Proceedings of the Conference on Categorical Algebra (La Jolla, Calif., 1965).New York: Springer-Verlag. pp. 1–20.
  26. ^McCauley, Joseph L. (2009).Dynamics of Markets: The New Financial Economics, Second Edition.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 241.ISBN978-0521429627.
  27. ^Simpson, William M. R.; Horsley, Simon A.H. (29 March 2022)."Toppling the Pyramids: Physics Without Physical State Monism".In Austin, Christopher J.; Marmodoro, Anna; Roselli, Andrea (eds.).Powers, Time and Free Will.Synthese Library. Vol. 451. Synthese Library. pp. 17–50.doi:10.1007/978-3-030-92486-7_2.ISBN9781003125860– via Springer.
  28. ^Guyer, Paul (2020),"18th Century German Aesthetics",in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.),The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(Fall 2020 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University,retrieved2023-03-16
  29. ^Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson, eds.The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science(2006) p. 161
  30. ^John W Carroll (2009)."Chapter 13: Anti-reductionism".InHelen Beebee;Christopher Hitchcock;Peter Menzies(eds.).The Oxford Handbook of Causation.Oxford Handbooks Online. p. 292.ISBN978-0199279739.
  31. ^Kukla A (1996). "Antirealist Explanations of the Success of Science".Philosophy of Science.63(1): S298–S305.doi:10.1086/289964.JSTOR188539.S2CID171074337.
  32. ^Pope ML (1982). "Personal construction of formal knowledge".Interchange.13(4): 3–14.doi:10.1007/BF01191417.S2CID198195182.
  33. ^Pope ML, Watts M (1988). "Constructivist Goggles: Implications for Process in Teaching and Learning Physics".Eur. J. Phys.9(2): 101–109.Bibcode:1988EJPh....9..101P.doi:10.1088/0143-0807/9/2/004.S2CID250876891.
  34. ^R.E. Ulanowicz,Ecology: The Ascendant Perspective,Columbia University Press (1997) (ISBN0231108281)
  35. ^abHuber, F; Schnauss, J; Roenicke, S; Rauch, P; Mueller, K; Fuetterer, C; Kaes, J (2013)."Emergent complexity of the cytoskeleton: from single filaments to tissue".Advances in Physics.62(1): 1–112.Bibcode:2013AdPhy..62....1H.doi:10.1080/00018732.2013.771509.PMC3985726.PMID24748680.online
  36. ^Clayton, P; Davies, P, eds. (2006). "The Re-emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion". New York: Oxford University Press.{{cite journal}}:Cite journal requires|journal=(help)

Further reading

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  • Churchland, Patricia (1986),Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain.MIT Press.
  • Dawkins, Richard (1976),The Selfish Gene.Oxford University Press; 2nd edition, December 1989.
  • Dennett, Daniel C. (1995)Darwin's Dangerous Idea.Simon & Schuster.
  • Descartes (1637),Discourses,Part V.
  • Dupre, John (1993),The Disorder of Things.Harvard University Press.
  • Galison, Peter and David J. Stump, eds. (1996),The Disunity of the Sciences: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power.Stanford University Press.
  • Jones, Richard H. (2013),Analysis & the Fullness of Reality: An Introduction to Reductionism & Emergence.Jackson Square Books.
  • Laughlin, Robert (2005),A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down.Basic Books.
  • Nagel, Ernest (1961),The Structure of Science.New York.
  • Pinker, Steven(2002),The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.Viking Penguin.
  • Ruse, Michael (1988),Philosophy of Biology.Albany, NY.
  • Rosenberg, Alexander(2006),Darwinian Reductionism or How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology.University of Chicago Press.
  • Eric Scerri The reduction of chemistry to physics has become a central aspect of the philosophy of chemistry. See several articles by this author.
  • Weinberg, Steven(1992),Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist's Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature,Pantheon Books.
  • Weinberg, Steven(2002) describes what he terms the culture war among physicists in his review ofA New Kind of Science.
  • Capra, Fritjof(1982),The Turning Point.
  • Lopez, F., Il pensiero olistico di Ippocrate. Riduzionismo, antiriduzionismo, scienza della complessità nel trattato sull'Antica Medicina, vol. IIA, Ed. Pubblisfera, Cosenza Italy 2008.
  • Maureen L Pope,Personal construction of formal knowledge,Humanities Social Science and Law, 13.4, December, 1982, pp. 3–14
  • Tara W. Lumpkin,Perceptual Diversity: Is Polyphasic Consciousness Necessary for Global Survival?December 28, 2006,bioregionalanimism.comArchived2016-04-10 at theWayback Machine
  • Vandana Shiva, 1995,Monocultures, Monopolies and the Masculinisation of Knowledge.International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Reports: Gender Equity. 23: 15–17.Gender and Equity (v. 23, no. 2, July 1995)
  • The Anti-Realist Side of the Debate: A Theory's Predictive Success does not Warrant Belief in the Unobservable Entities it Postulates Andre Kukla and Joel Walmsley.
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