What is "reductionist"

Usage examples of "reductionist".

It is this procedure, which involves turning a reductionist methodology into a reductionist philosophy, that is the manoeuvre so popular among molecular biologists and some geneticists, but, fortunately, is rather rarer among psychologists or neurobiologists.

No book whose central characters are young chicks could be complete without a tribute to Pat Bateson, who was responsible, back in the 1960s, for my first blind date with what has become a continuing obsession, and who since then has continued to sharpen the experimental wits of one whose first training was, after all, in the most reductionist of the neurosciences.

If Skinner and Pavlov were reductionists, the gestaltists were holistic.

Papert rightly describes it, one group of modelers, those I describe as reductionist, argued that the proper approach for Al was to take the brain and to endeavour to simulate some of its known properties using computers.

But the enthusiastic reductionist manifesto with which the project began has not so far yielded great neurobiological dividends in the form of universal mechanisms of the sort which E.

Like Pavlov, Skinner was a materialist, anxious to eliminate mind from his psychological equations, and his materialism, also like that of Pavlov, is mechanical and reductionist.

From the beginning, there were two contrasting approaches, which we may characterize, crudely, as reductionist and holistic.

It is this procedure, which involves turning a reductionist methodology into a reductionist philosophy, that is the manoeuvre so popular among molecular biologists and some geneticists, but, fortunately, is rather rarer among psychologists or neurobiologists.

If you understand everything about the ingredients, the reductionist argues, you understand everything.

I therefore have no right to privilege the reductionist knowledge of the laboratory over the experiential knowledge of human life outside the lab. The ontological argument is more extreme.

She set up her reductionist stall, arguing for the ultimate collapse of psychology into neuroanatomy, perhaps expecting an easy ride from a group of neurobiologists, and found to her surprise that it was strongly opposed by most present - especially the neuroanatomists!

They may be invoked to privilege the personal, to protect us from a crassly reductionist biology - at its worst, vulgar sociobiology - but such attempts at privilege merely serve to harden the resolve of biological reductionists, and to encourage the fragmentation of our understanding of what can ultimately only be understood as a unitary world.

But the hierarchical reductionist believes that carburettors are explained in terms of smaller units .

But the enthusiastic reductionist manifesto with which the project began has not so far yielded great neurobiological dividends in the form of universal mechanisms of the sort which E. coli provided.

Population geneticists tend to work with a much more rigorous and reductionist definition, a gene's-eye view of evolution, in which the essential phenomenon is a change in gene frequency - the rate at which a particular gene occurs amongst a population of organisms of the same species - within such a population.