A theory that all complex systems can be completely understood in terms of their components

Usage examples of reductionism.

Nevertheless, science has progressed together with the ideology of scientific materialism that does embody a number of sacrosanct theories and a priori statements, namely the principles of objectivism, monism, universalism, reductionism, the closure principle, and physicalism.

As, at least in neuroscience, the theoretical limitations of naive reductionism become increasingly apparent, and cold-war suspicions recede into history, the time is ripe for the autonomous Soviet tradition in neurophysiology and psychology to be reassimilated into a more integrated and Universalists neuroscience.

Bridging this gap, I maintain, is essential if we are to move beyond our fragmented culture towards a new synthesis which transcends both the ruthless reductionism of a science indifferent human values and a subjectivism for which truth is but one story amongst many of equal worth.

Upon the demise of the introspectionist movement in modern psychology in the early years of the twentieth century, behaviorism also adopted the principle of reductionism by studying the behavior of animals as a means to understanding human behavior.

It is a massive reductionism, he says, that collapses truth and meaning into functional capacity, and reduces intersubjectivity to rather crass egocentrism.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, until the last few post-Marxist years, Soviet psychology and neurophysiology were set within a specific philosophical tradition which explicitly counterposed a dialectical understanding of mind-brain relations to the mechanistic reductionism which dominates Anglo-American science.

As, at least in neuroscience, the theoretical limitations of naive reductionism become increasingly apparent, and cold-war suspicions recede into history, the time is ripe for the autonomous Soviet tradition in neurophysiology and psychology to be reassimilated into a more integrated and Universalists neuroscience.

But precisely because these quadrants are all so intimately correlated, I can indeed attempt an aggressive reductionism, and it can actually seem to make a lot of sense.

Assuming that their contexts are well founded, and assuming that they do not engage in reductionism, then there is much we can learn from each of these types of theorists.

It will mean discarding many shibboleths, the naive molecular reductionism of the biochemists, the and behaviourism of the psychologists, but we can see the goal clearly.

Understanding and functioning in these worlds, it seems, demands radically different epistemologies from the controlled reductionism of the lab.

As I said, in many cases their hearts are in the right place, but their theoriesbecause they are empirical and monological, because they are weakest-noodle sciences, because they deal with exteriors than can be seen and not interiors that must be arduously interpretedbecause of all that, they end up with a truly insidious form of reductionism, insidious because they are almost completely unaware of what they have done.

Understanding and functioning in these worlds, it seems, demands radically different epistemologies from the controlled reductionism of the lab. Am I then an irretrievably fractured person, entering and re-entering these different worlds of meaning?

In short, the metaphysical principle of reductionism declares that there is nothing that living or nonliving things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.

New Age paradigms and ecotheorists follow this version of subtle reductionism.